Defects and Failures in Legal Artifacts

Defects and Failures in Legal Artifacts

Much progress has been made in recent years in understanding the role of functions in defining legal artifacts. However, confusion still exists in the literature regarding when a functional deficit will render a legal artifact defective or completely remove its legal status. Let us say that the non-defectiveness conditions of an artifact kind are those features that a token artifact must possess to count as a non-defective example of the kind, while its existence conditions are those features a token artifact must possess to count as a member of the kind at all. This chapter examines the relationship between these two conditions as they apply to legal artifacts. It begins by distinguishing intended functions and use functions, discussing their respective salience for determining the proper functions of artifacts. It then shows how an account of the proper function of an artifact can yield conceptually independent descriptions of its non-defectiveness and existence conditions. Roughly, an artifact that is not minimally adapted to perform its proper function is defective, while an artifact that is constitutively incapable of performing its function fails to count as a member of the kind. I flesh out the notion of constitutive incapability, arguing that it involves assessing the centrality of an artifact's properties in fulfilling or defeating the imputed plans of its (actual or hypothetical) creators. I conclude by showing how this theory yields a coherent and compelling account of defects and failures in legal artifacts.

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