Interrogative Challenges in Legal Discourse

This article develops the Open Question Dialectic (OQD), a metajurisprudential framework for analyzing how legal discourse regulates interrogative challenges. Rather than focusing on the truth or validity of legal propositions, the OQD examines which challenges legal practices admit as proper internal moves, redirect elsewhere, or block from uptake. It distinguishes compliance-open questions from status-open questions and introduces the concepts of weak and strong rejection, erosion, and escalation to explain shifts in the structure of legal discourse. The framework is then applied to leading jurisprudential theories, showing that they differ not only in what they count as law, but also in how they organize closure and reopening within legal reasoning. The article argues that the OQD provides a new comparative dimension for jurisprudence by revealing distinct architectures of legal discourse that remain invisible when theories are compared solely through their criteria of legal validity or their accounts of the relation between law and morality.