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Legal Positivism

The standard party line of the legal positivists goes that laws are created through social behavior and, while in some distant sense express a normative moral will of the people, don’t latch on…

In 1977, legal scholar and philosopher Ronald Dworkin published the seminal book Taking Rights Seriously. While the book is a landmark work for those interested in the philosophy of the law, it also had a…

With Evidence from Legal Theory. Philosopher and legal theorist Brian Leiter articulates a common opinion in his essay “Rethinking Legal Realism: Towards a Naturalized Jurisprudence” when he says that any attempt to eschew transcendental thinking consequences relativism. This consequence, however, is not necessary. His opinion stems from a misguided acknowledgment that there is a philosophically meaningful distinction between realism (the belief that our descriptions of word hook up to the way things truly are) and anti-realism (the belief that our descriptions do so correspond).

There is nothing foundational about philosophy and therefore, nothing foundational about law. To some philosophy is the programme that seeks to found our rational thoughts in an unmovable, universal, all-encompassing, propositional truth as it as…

In response to Brian Reilly’s post “Heidegger on Welfare”…

Richard Rorty draws a sharp distinction between our private and public lives but doesn’t offer a very definitive account of what that means. To…

Microeconomics boils down to (i) finding inequalities that represent rational behavior and (ii) optimizing that behavior with respect to two or more constraints. The purpose of this type of inquiry is to define conduct for…