This essay endeavors to comment on the main themes of Ernest J. Weinrib’s The Idea of Private Law. Weinrib’s primary example of private law, and the example I shall pursue here, is tort law. In a typical torts case, the plaintiff complains that he has been injured as the proximate result of the wrongdoing (usually the negligence) of the defendant. This, the plaintiff says, is a breach of legal duty for which the defendant is liable. Questions about the foundations of tort law are questions about the significance of the terms in this story and about why, when it is proven that a transaction characterizable in these terms has occurred, the plaintiff is entitled to what he asks for, namely, compensation.

This article examines and criticizes the conventional evidence doctrine and its core principle (albeit with exceptions) of legally unregulated fact-finding. New foundations for evidence law are offered that reflect a principled allocation of the risk of error in conditions of uncertainty. Such conditions are present in virtually every litigated case. This article opposes the doctrine of ‘free proof’. That doctrine underlies the current flowering of discretion injudicial fact-finding and is responsible for the ongoing abolition of evidentiary rules. The evidence law theory developed in this article is of course itself theory-dependent. Far from claiming the theory here is uniquely correct rather than simply valid, I shall be satisfied by its survival as yet “another view of the Cathedral”. Nonetheless, evidence law as conventionally portrayed can hardly be compared with Monet’s Cathedral. It is conspicuously more like Pisa’s Leaning Tower. This article aims at returning the leaning tower of evidence law to an upright position.

In “Why Should Liberals Care about Equality?,” Ronald Dworkin distinguishes between two forms of liberalism, one form based on neutrality, and the other one based on equality. As Dworkin explains it, proponents of both forms argue against legal incursion into private morality, and argue in favour of increased sexual, political, racial, and economic equality; however, they disagree about which of these traditionally liberal values is the fundamental one, and which is its derivative. Liberalism based on neutrality takes as its fundamental value that one which holds that government must remain neutral with respect to moral issues, and it supports egalitarian measures only insofar as they can be shown to derive from that constitutive principle. For liberalism based on equality, the fundamental value is that one which holds that government must treat each of its citizens as an equal; egalitarian liberalism insists upon moral neutrality only to the extent that equality requires it.

It is not easy to come up with a characterization of legal positivism that is not vacuous and yet at the same time is sufficiently general to capture the myriad theories of law to which, over the years, the positivist label has been attached. Wil Waluchow suggests in his recent book Inclusive Legal Positivism that the core of positivism is the simple claim that any connections between law and morality are contingent only, dependent on whether the right kinds of laws have been created in the right kinds of ways (81). As a thumb-nail sketch of positivism this suggestion is plausible enough, so far as it goes, but it is important to note that it focuses on the possible connection between moral value and law, as opposed to that between moral value and theories of law. For there is an important strand in positivist thought that is as concerned with denying the latter type of connection as it is with denying the former. We can, in other words, distinguish between what we might call methodological and substantive versions of positivism.

Human reason is frequently frustrated. Efforts to act rationally—leave aside the fact that human beings are sometimes deliberately irrational—can be thwarted by a variety of obstacles and limitations. The fact that rationality often proves elusive ensures, among other things, that rationally-motivated courses of action sometimes have counter-productive consequences. Attempts to make certain goods and activities seem unattractive may lead people to be attracted to them. Endeavours to legislate in the public interest can sometimes make things worse for intended beneficiaries. Efforts at rational action, in short, can backfire.

It is not easy to summarize what this book is about, except to say that it is an exploration of a variety of themes and a variety of authors on the role of language in the practice of law, the role of theories of language in legal theory, and how all this bears on “the problems of legal determinacy.” By the latter we are to understand problems having to do with whether the law always, almost always, or never provides uniquely correct answers to legal questions like “Does the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms invalidate the Federal government’s ban on tobacco advertising?” or “Is this defendant guilty of defamatory libel?” The works of several authors are discussed, with emphasis placed on Wittgenstein, Friedrich Waismann, Herbert Hart, Ronald Dworkin, Michael Moore, and Lon Fuller. As with the writings of Wittgenstein, who serves as Bix’s philosophical inspiration, it is not always abundantly clear what the discussions all add up to. Nevertheless, it is possible to distil from Bix’s somewhat unfocused discussions the following central themes. These, as Bix himself notes, are linked by nothing stronger than “family resemblance.”

A specter of disunity haunts the common law, threatening to throw property, contract, tort, and penal law into a crisis, where competing paradigms stand intransigently opposed, undermining any claims of coherence and giving sober proof that legality is a battleground of equally unjustifiable ideologies where only force wins out at the end. The impending crisis pits advocates of liberalism, affirming the primacy of the right over the good, against communitarians, upholding the priority of commonly shared ends embodied in an historically given community. Yet although the conflict parallels what many take to be the exhaustive options of ethical thought, the difficulty extends beyond theoretical dispute into the actual practice of common law, where at every turn, tendencies promoting welfare clash with tendencies upholding the formal right of ownership. In face of such division in both theory and practice, the dangers of idealism seem hardly surmountable by fidelity to law or by reflective equilibrium, for if disunity pervades legal thought and convention, neither appeal to the given can locate a coherent kernel in the conflicted shell.