While I have endeavored in this book to make an original contribution to the debates surrounding the matters which I discuss, I have likewise striven to provide an accessible overview of those matters. Though I have not altogether eschewed the technical terminology of philosophy – since that terminology is often crucial for the distillation of complex ideas and for the avoidance of cumbersome prose – I have sought to explain each technical term or phrase whenever it first appears (and occasionally also thereafter). Similarly, although I have not dispensed with footnotes completely, I have kept them to a minimum. The ideas presented in this book are sometimes complicated, but I have done my best to articulate them clearly for a wide audience.

As will become apparent in my opening chapter, objectivity is a multifaceted phenomenon. In connection with law, and also in connection with most other domains of human thought and activity, the notion of objectivity gets invoked in quite a few distinct senses. Nonetheless, despite the complex variegatedness of that notion, it partakes of a certain overarching unity. Specifically, each of the dimensions of objectivity is defined in opposition to a corresponding dimension of subjectivity. Legal objectivity, in its manifold aspects, is what marks the divide between the rule of law and the rule of men.

Because of the constraints on the length of each volume in the Introductions to Philosophy and Law series, I have had to forbear from exploring several important topics that would need to be pondered in any full treatment of the objectivity of law.