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Metaphors And Models Of Law: The Judge As Priest, Philip Soper

Michigan Law Review

The reasons that prompt people to try to identify laws or legal systems in advance of encounter are varied. One is that laws, though less concrete than chairs, are equally capable of posing obstacles to conduct: they can be stumbled over. If the desire to avoid such contact were the sole reason for trying to decide "what law is,'' Holmes' aphorism would work fairly well: by predicting judicial decisions and calculating the likelihood of avoiding accompanying sanctions, one could play a good game of "bad man's" bluff around legal obstacles to chosen courses of action.

The claim that law is …

Legal Theory And The Obligation Of A Judge: The Hart/Dworkin Dispute, E. Philip Soper

Michigan Law Review

This article offers a review of the Hart-Dworkin dispute and a qualified defense of the positivist's model against Dworkin's attack. The defense is cast primarily in the form of the second possible response to a descriptive theory: Dworkin's attack fails, I suggest, because it involves descriptive claims that can be accommodated to the positivist's conceptual theory regardless of one's view about the plausibility of those claims.