Epistemic models for justification and law

The whole epistemological enterprise is thought to be reduced to strict dichotomies of foundationalism versus coherentism. Is this rivalry tenable? In the first part, the paper practices such a distinction with particular reference to theories of law and, by taking the figure of the idealized judge drawn by Dworkin, Hercules, into special account, sketches out some common features of coherence legal theories. In the second part, the paper explores the very general idea of defeasible reasoning as a related avenue of investigation that corresponds to the various difficulties to which foundational and coherence legal theories are exposed.