Authority, Reason, and Competence in Issues of Legal Truth

Legal officials—legislators, heads of administrative agencies, judges, etc.—have the competence to make new law. Sometimes, though, the new law made is via inadvertence or error, and, on such occasions, the content of law as determined through conventional doctrinal analysis may be in tension with recognition of the authorized but mistaken actions of the legal officials. In a sense, this shows an instability in the concept of competence, for the powers to change the law may be, in practice, different from the standards prescribed, and in ways that are not always predictable. This complication for the analysis of legal truth and legal content is exacerbated by the fact that any such errors may or may not be corrected (and the correction may or may not be relatively prompt). Where ‘reason’ and ‘will’ get entangled in this way, even simple bivalence may not fully hold: both ‘X is the law’ and ‘X is not the law’ may be correct.