Law Commons^™

Planning For Legality, Jeremy Waldron

Michigan Law Review

What is law like? What can we compare it with in order to illuminate its character and suggest answers to some of the perennial questions of jurisprudence? Natural lawyers compare laws to moral propositions. A human law is an attempt by someone who has responsibility for a human community to replicate, publicize, and enforce a proposition of objective morality such as "Killing is wrong." Law is like moral reasoning, say the natural lawyers, and laws should be regarded as principles of right reason (principles that reason dictates as answers to the moral questions that need to be addressed in human …