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The Model Of Plans And The Prospects For Positivism, Scott Hershovitz
The Model Of Plans And The Prospects For Positivism, Scott Hershovitz
Reviews
In Legality, Scott Shapiro builds his case for legal positivism on a simple premise: laws are plans. Recognition of that fact leads to legal positivism, Shapiro says, because the content of a plan is fixed by social facts. In this essay, I argue that Shapiro’s case for legal positivism fails. Moreover, I argue that we can learn important lessons about the prospects for positivism by attending to the ways in the argument fails. As I show, the flaws in Shapiro’s argument reveal structural problems with a family of prominent positivist views, including the one defended by Joseph Raz.
Cute Prickly Critter With Presbyopia, Don Herzog
Cute Prickly Critter With Presbyopia, Don Herzog
Reviews
Ronald Dworkin's' latest, long-awaited, and most ambitious book is a puzzle. Truth in advertising first: despite the title, this isn't centrally a book about justice. It's a book about the realm of value-all of that realm. Dworkin is most interested here in morality, but really touches on all of it, as a matter of the application of the abstract argument and sometimes in black and white right on the page, from aesthetics to prudence to morality to politics to law to . . . . It's fun to read, also frustrating. It stretches out lazily in handling some issues but …
"How To Think About Equality." Review Of Sovereign Virtue: The Theory And Practice Of Equality, By R. Dworkin, Don Herzog
Reviews
Ronald Dworkin's' latest might well seem sharply discontinuous with his other work. The formal theoretical apparatus that kicks off the book is a forbiddingly abstract - some will say arcane - hypothetical auction, coupled with a hypothetical insurance market. There is simply nothing like it in Taking Rights Seriously, or A Matter of Principle, or Law's Empire, or Life's Dominion, or Freedom's Law. Then again, Dworkin first published the key papers on the auction some twenty years. ago and has never flagged, as far as I know, in his commitment to the basic project.2 Theorists have been waiting for the …
Dworkin's Domain, Philip E. Soper
Dworkin's Domain, Philip E. Soper
Reviews
No one has done more in the last twenty years to revitalize debates about how judges should and do decide cases than Ronald Dworkin. At the same time, no one has been more equivocal than Dworkin in explaining how a theory of adjudication bears on the dispute within legal theory about the connection between law and morality. This fine book continues both traditions.