Law Commons^™

Three Concepts Of Roles, W. Bradley Wendel

San Diego Law Review

There is something distinctive about the law, legal reasoning, and the role of lawyers. That distinctiveness is captured by the idea that normative reasoning by citizens in communities is necessarily aimed at discovering what rights and obligations everyone ought to have, consistent with the interests of other citizens. It is implausible to believe that ordinary moral reasoning is well-suited to working out a scheme of public entitlements that is suited to regulating the interactions among citizens who disagree about what their entitlements ought to be. The law has authority to the extent it enables people to do better than they …