I recently published a long article discussing a variety of topics from Joseph Raz’s The Morality of Freedom. The article was part of a symposium on Raz’s work in the Southern California Law Review . Raz responded to the articles in that symposium, including my own.

From a perspective which surveys the whole range of views on political philosophy, Raz’s view and mine look very similar. Even so, we find many things to disagree about, which neither of us would regard as merely matters of detail. For the most part, we at least share a common understanding of our disagreements. But there is one set of issues we disagree about and where we seem to lack even a common understanding of the disagreement. These are issues about how authoritative directives function as reasons for action, and about whether, when we follow authority in the proper way, we can be said to “obey” it.

But, even ignoring the vagueness of “believes in”, this tells us even less about liberalism than,

tells us about Catholicism. Neither statement distinguishes one creed from its rivals. Socialists, conservatives, anarchists and Buddhists can all believe in liberty (sometimes, but not always, different concepts of liberty); just as Protestants, Jews, Muslims and Hindus all believe in God (sometimes, but not always, different gods). (2), though, has at least the virtue of conveying one definite, fundamental and necessary belief of the Catholic: that there exists a supreme being. It is agreed, even by sympathizers, that (1) gives the liberal no such thing. “By definition, a liberal is a man who believes in liberty,” says Professor Cranston, “but because different men at different times have meant different things by liberty, ‘liberalism’ is correspondingly ambiguous.” If Liberty be its god, it should come as no surprise that liberalism is a schismatic church.

In Law’s Empire, Ronald Dworkin introduces an important distinction between what he calls the ‘grounds’ and the ‘force’ of law. The former primarily interest Dworkin in LE and concern the “circumstances in which particular propositions of law should be taken to be sound or true.” (110) Propositions of law, we are told, are “all the various statements and claims people make about what the law allows or prohibits or entitles them to have.” (4) That Canadians owing income tax to the federal government must file their returns before April 30 or face a late penalty is presumably an example of a proposition of law. That the United States constitution prohibits slavery is another. These (true) propositions of law simply report the law’s (present) requirements, requirements which normally should be respected but which might justifiably be disobeyed or disregarded in exceptional cases. A true proposition of law, then, does not necessarily entail an answer to the question: What should I do, or decide (if called upon to render a judicial decision)? It also does not necessarily entail an answer to the question: Should the coercive power of the state be exercised against this person?

Contemporary legal theory is increasingly marked by the clash between two opposing, basic approaches to law and legal doctrine. The first approach is skeptical: it seeks both to expose the conceptual and normative commitments of tort or contract or constitutional law, and to impeach them on the grounds that they comprise what are in fact incoherent and morally insupportable ideologies. By contrast, the second approach is explicitly apologetic: it aims to celebrate law by offering a reconstruction and justification of the basic features of constitutional or statutory or common law practice. The first approach is of course represented by the “deconstructionism” imported into law from literary and social theory by those scholars associated with the Critical Legal Studies (“CLS”) movement. At its most controversial, the work of these recent legal skeptics seeks to link traditional legal doctrine, and the modes of analysis and pedagogic methods peculiar to it, with a radical critique of political liberalism by showing that the doctrine and its methods serve to legitimate existing social inequalities, hierarchies, and forms of domination, while at the same time obscuring their own legitimating role. One important corollary of this general thesis is the emphasis upon what Roberto Unger has called “the contradictory and manipulable character of legal doctrine”, i.e., the effort, inspired by the familiar deconstructionist premise that texts lack any fixed or stable and coherently formulable meaning, to “deconstruct” the basic categories of (liberal) legal discourse with the aim of exposing tensions and inconsistencies inherent within them, and of depicting the responsiveness of this “patchwork quilt” to background social, political, and economic forces.

Is there the possibility of a critical standpoint from which to adjudicate the correctness or validity of constitutional interpretation? This basic question has been given considerable attention in contemporary constitutional theory and has been the focus of the pragmatist law as literature movement born of the interpretive turn in legal theory. At issue is the very purpose of constitutional practice: is it to recover the truth of a set of foundational, moral ideals from the constitution and apply it to a particular factual conflict? Or is it to preserve continuity between the various elements of our cultural practices, to keep the peace?

Despite the tremendous literature that has sprung up concerning Hart’s The Concept of Law, one very important feature of the work has been somewhat overlooked: its methodological underpinnings. While Hart himself says The Concept of Law may “be regarded as an essay in descriptive sociology”, this claim has not received adequate philosophical examination. Though a dedicated philosophical positivist, the distinctive feature of Hart’s legal philosophy – the internal aspect of rules – requires a social science methodology that moves him in the direction of hermeneutics. In defending the importance of the internal aspect of rules against the predictive theory of Scandinavian Legal Realist Alf Ross, Hart argues that without the internal aspect, one