“The Trolley Problem” is the name Judith Jarvis Thomson has given to a difficult problem in moral philosophy and legal theory. The problem arises by considering a series of cases, all of which involve a choice of evils. Many, but not all of these cases, involve an out-of-control trolley about to run over a group of five people. In each case we are asked for our intuitive judgment as to whether it would be permissible to save the five people at risk when doing so would require the death of, or the imposition of a high risk of death on, another human being.

This article discusses the place of integrity in Ronald Dworkin's legal and political philosophy. It presents integrity as a response to certain problems that arise in any society in which more than one contestant view about justice is allowed to determine public policy and legal principle. It also analyzes the relation between integrity and justice, arguing that although integrity requires citizens and officials sometimes to uphold policies or positions they take to be unjust, Dworkin is nevertheless wrong to present them as competing political virtues. Instead, integrity operates as a second-level concept, addressing situations that arise in a society where there is disagreement about justice (and where, therefore, there is no uncontroversial account of what justice requires to set against the requirements of integrity). The article concludes with some reflections on the role of individual convictions about justice in context of law and social action.

Rational-choice theory is pervasive in legal theorizing. Most law and economics work assumes that human beings make decisions that are rational as to both their ends and means. Decisions are ends-rational if they are directed at goals that satisfy the person's utility function; decisions are means-rational if they adopt methods reasonably connected to achieving those goals. Institutionalist theory assumes that institutions are composed of actors pursuing their own rational ends by rational means and, further, that those institutions themselves can be said to have rational ends pursued by rational means. Most rational-choice theorizing in law is positive: Thinkers are using the theory as a stylized way of describing patterns of behavior or predicting expected behavior. Such theorizing can also be normative: Rationality of ends and means is an aspiration of human and institutional actors, and law can improve upon existing behavior through rules, procedures, and structures.

Economic theory is built on assumptions about human behavior—assumptions embodied in rational-choice theory. Underlying these assumptions are implicit notions about how we think and learn. These implicit notions are fundamentally important to social explanation. The very plausibility of the explanations that we develop out of rational-choice theory rests crucially on the accuracy of these notions about cognition and rationality. But there is a basic problem: There is often very little relationship between the assumptions that rational-choice theorists make and the way that humans actually act and learn in everyday life. This has significant implications for economic theory and practice. It leads to bad theories and inadequate explanations; it produces bad predictions and, thus, supports ineffective social policies.

Some people hate themselves. But if I say, “I hate myself,” who is this “I” that stands apart from “myself”? And notice how in the expression “I am not myself today,” the “I” and “myself” change places. Now it is “myself” who is the authentic, the authoritative, the judgmental “I,” and it is “I” who is the self that is judged and found wanting. Some people talk to themselves; when they do, who is speaking and who is listening?

Rational expectations models have become a staple of economic theory and the basis for a Nobel Prize. This article argues that rational expectations analysis suffers from potentially fatal flaws that seriously undermine its value in understanding many market phenomena. Using the example of financial markets, the article illustrates how the rational expectations approach has worked to obscure, rather than to illuminate, our understanding of speculation and speculative markets. This misguidance raises problems for law and policy.

In contrast to logical criteria of rationality, which can be assessed entirely by reference to the system of preferences, substantive criteria of rational choice refer to an independent evaluation of the outcomes of decisions. One of these substantive criteria is the experienced hedonic utility of outcomes. Research indicates that people are myopic in their decisions, may lack skill in predicting their future tastes, and can be led to erroneous choices by fallible memory and incorrect evaluation of past experiences. Theoretical and practical implications of these challenges to the assumption of economic rationality are discussed.

In the course of discussing his conception of community, Ronald Dworkin refers favorably, though in passing and rather elliptically, to Jean-Jacques Rousseau and his concept of the general will. Dworkin suggests important similarities exist between Rousseau's “general will” and Dworkin's own understanding of community and his related theory of “law as integrity.”

Let us take, as a starting assumption, the Benthamic understanding of the point of law: We should make laws that will increase the overall happiness of the people whose lives are affected by them. But how should we go about doing that? And more particularly, what role, if any, should our held desires play in the task of ascertaining the content of our happiness? And when, if ever, should we defer to the desires of the affected masses, and when should we not, in determining what will or will not promote happiness? The classical, or “hedonic,” utilitarians of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries suggested a number of answers to these related questions, of which I will mention two.

The fair use doctrine is at once the most significant and the most problematic qualification of the copyright owner's right to exclusivity. An affirmative defense against copyright liability, the fair use doctrine legitimates certain unauthorized reproductions of copyrighted materials that would otherwise be regarded as copyright infringements. Notwithstanding its importance, “fair use” continues to be “the most troublesome [doctrine] in the whole law of copyright.” Throughout its long history, neither courts nor legislatures have provided a useful definition of “fair use” nor have they adumbrated its objectjves. Since the doctrine's inception over two and a half centuries ago, courts and legislatures have attempted to formulate, explicate, refine, and revamp the fair use doctrine. Generally, these efforts have proven unfruitful. At best, they have resulted in various formulations of how to approach fair use questions that offer courts and users of copyrighted works scant guidance on how fair use should be recognized. All this would not have been of grave concern had judges shared a common understanding of fair use or of the principles that should guide them in deciding fair use cases. The problem is that they do not. Rather, the case law reflects wdely divergent notions of the concept of fair use. The lack of consensus is best witnessed in the multiple reversals and divided courts that have become the hallmark of fair use litigation.

Challenging problems for moral and legal culpability, as Jennifer Radden has impressively brought to our attention, are generated when people suffering from dissociative-identity disorder commit various transgressions. In the type of case of interest in this paper, “Self2” of a two-self multiple is unaware that “Self1” has committed a crime and has played no role in Self1's commission of the crime. This case generates, among others, the following pressing problems. Is Self2 morally to blame for Self1's deed, and is the multiple itself either morally or legally culpable for this deed? In this paper, after critically discussing some of Radden's views on these issues, I defend negative responses to both these questions by appealing to central constituents of a theory of moral responsibility.

The use of vague language in law has important implications for legal theory. Legal philosophers have occasionally grappled with those implications, but they have not come to grips with the characteristic phenomenon of vagueness: the sorites paradox. I discuss the paradox, and claim that it poses problems for some legal theorists (David Lyons, Hans Kelsen, and, especially, Ronald Dworkin). I propose that a good account of vagueness will have three consequences for legal theory: (i) Theories that deny that vagueness in formulations of the law leads to discretion in adjudication (including Dworkin's) cannot accommodate “higher-order” vagueness, (ii) A legal theory should accept that the law is partly indeterminate when it can be stated in vague language, (iii) However, the traditional formulation of the indeterminacy claim, that a vague statement is “neither true nor false” in a borderline case, is misconceived and should be abandoned.

At least since the French moralists—Montaigne, Pascal, La Rochefoucauld, La Bruyère—it has been a commonplace that people can fool themselves as well as others about their beliefs and motivations. In this article, I consider some mechanisms of transmutation (deceiving oneself) and misrepresentation (deceiving others), and their impact on behavior. (I refer to these collectively as transformations.) I argue that deception and self-deception are not merely ex post rationalizations of behavior whose real motive and explanation are found elsewhere, but that they have independent causal and explanatory power. If people, that is, did not fool themselves or others about why they do what they do they would act differently. The reason is that deception and self-deception take place under constraints that prevent us from offering totally opportunistic or self-serving rationalizations of what we do. There is a consistency constraint that is induced by the costs of being seen (by oneself or others) as offering inconsistent justifications for one's behavior, and an imperfection constraint diat is induced by the costs of being seen (by oneself or others) as offering justifications that are too blatantly self-serving.

The concept of “difference” forms the core of contemporary attacks on “liberal legalism” and is central to proposals for replacing it. Critics charge that liberal law quashes difference because it grounds political equality and individual rights in the assumption that all persons share certain “samenesses,” such as rationality or autonomy. In the words of the philosopher Iris Marion Young, “liberal individualism denies difference by positing the self as a solid, self-sufficient unity, not defined by or in need of anything or anyone other than itself.” The claim is that this “sameness”-based vision of equality is in fact an exercise of power, reflecting a highly specific model of personhood that was constructed by and for a white male elite and ensures its continued social dominance. Liberalism's critics conclude that the achievement of social justice will be possible only when sameness-based conceptions of equality are rejected.

John Martin Fischer's The Metaphysics of Free Will is devoted to two major projects. First, Fischer defends the thesis that determinism is incompatible with a person's control over alternatives to the actual future. Second, Fischer defends the striking thesis that such control is not necessary for moral responsibility. This review essay examines Fischer's arguments for each thesis. Fischer's defense of the incompatibilist thesis is the most innovative to date, and I argue that his formulation restructures the free will debate. To defend his second thesis Fischer relies upon examples designed to show that an agent is responsible for an unavoidable action. I criticize Fischer's account of these examples, but I also maintain that my criticisms do not compromise his theory of responsibility. I raise several other difficulties for Fischer's theory of responsibility, and I close by offering some suggestions about how he might further defend it.

Consider the following examples of behavior by Smith:

1. Smith, seated at her restaurant table, gives an order to the waiter;

2. Smith gets into a cab and names a destination;

3. Smith agrees to Jones's suggestion that they go back to Jones's apartment for a few drinks;

4. Smith casts her vote in some election.

In each of these instances what can Smith be understood as consenting to? Is she consenting to (1) pay the bill for whatever meal she orders; (2) pay the fare for the journey to her named destination; (3) sexual intimacy with Jones; and (4) accept the authority of whatever individual or political part is elected? The fact that Smith does not actually express her consent to each of these states of affairs or outcomes need not mean that she is not giving her consent to them. The idea that individuals can give their consent in ways other than by means of a formal verbal expression of agreement is a familiar, if controversial, one.

Jon Elster's subtle and richly illustrated argument raises more avenues of inquiry and application than one could possibly explore in a short comment. I will therefore confine myself to addressing three interrelated questions:

First, can the distinctions among interest, passion, and reason on which his analysis depends really be maintained?

Second, what implications does his work hold for some republican and liberal theories that insist on a public sphere purged of interest and passion or that defend a private sphere providing the space necessary to indulge interest and passion?

Finally, what does his analysis tell us about the possibility of a meta-theory that would mediate among interest, passion, and reason?

With regard to the first question, Elster's own argument suggests that the boundaries among interest, passion, and reason are at least permeable. Each motive masquerades as the other or becomes transmuted into the other. Moreover, once one takes the consistency and imperfection constraints into account, the external manifestations of the different motives will often be identical. A positivist, who believes that all that matters are external manifestations that can be measured or observed, might therefore hold that the distinctions Elster analyzes are ones that are hardly worth worrying about.