Intellectual authority is defined as the authority of arguments that prevail by virtue of good reasoning and do not depend on coercion or convention.
Topic
Whether legal authority is intellectual (the force of good reasoning) or institutional (the power to enforce), and how the two interact.
Framework
Present Debate. The author engages critics who reduce legal authority to institutional authority and argues that legal systems contain genuine intellectual authority too.
Main Point
Legal systems contain a significant degree of intellectual authority — not just institutional power. Even when judges defer to precedent (institutional), they revisit, revise, or reject decisions when those decisions are badly reasoned or out of step with current standards (intellectual).
P1: Two kinds of authority
Intellectual authority = arguments that prevail by good reasoning alone. Institutional authority = power to enforce arguments regardless of merit. Legal systems are interesting: they're institutions that aspire to purely intellectual authority. One judge claims courts merely apply intellectual authority and have no coercive power of their own.
P2: Author's first response to the critics
Some critics say legal authority is exclusively institutional, even that intellectual authority reduces to institutional authority. But not all institution-accepted arguments survive over time, and some well-reasoned arguments never get institutional recognition. Reasonable arguments often go unrecognized in their own time when they challenge institutional beliefs. So intellectual authority and institutional consensus are not the same thing.
P3: The critics' counter — the musicology example
Critics respond: intellectual authority is recognized only because of institutional consensus. Take the musicology example — judging that a composer ignored for decades probably isn't a genius relies on the time-unit "decades," which is itself an institutional construct. Nothing makes a particular number of decades reasonable evidence except that institutional procedures have proved useful. Assessing intellectual authority thus requires appealing to institutional procedures.