Brian Leiter’s Legal Philosophy Blog

Thinking out loud about problems in legal philosophy

  • Berlin and Hart, now Fuller and Kelsen

    I was teaching Kelsen last year (a big chunk of the 2nd edition of the Pure Theory), and while doing background research I came across this remarkable story (that called to mind Isaiah Berlin’s infamous “recommendation” of H.L.A. Hart). Roscoe Pound at Harvard Law School had, correctly, identified Hans Kelsen as the preeminent figure in…

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  • “What do you do when you do jurisprudence? Challenges and New Paths”

    MOVING TO FRONT–THIS EVENT IS COMING UP NEXT WEEK This upcoming roundtable at the UK chapter of the IVR (the international association for legal philosophy), organized by Daniel Murata (Surrey), will be online, for those who might be interested:

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  • Illinois-Penn Seminar in Legal Theory on Zoom invites inquiries about attending

    Leo Katz (Penn) and Michael Moore (Illinois, formerly Penn) shared this announcement: This year’s iteration of the annual Zoom-only Illinois/Penn Legal Theory Seminar taught by Leo Katz and Michael Moore will be devoted to a chapter-by-chapter examination of a new book by Heidi Hurd and Michael Moore, The Morality of the Criminal Law (Edward Elgar…

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  • “The Collective: Women in Legal Philosophy”

    Information about this organization and its events here. As legal philosopher Barbara Baum Levenbook (a member of the Executive Committee) wrote to me: The mission of The Collective is to promote and support women in legal philosophy and legal theory (broadly defined) who have a commitment to analytical methodology.  The Collective began in 2022 as the brainchild of…

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  • “From a Realist Point of View” exists!

    (UPDATE: Amazon is currently selling the hardcover at an 18% discount [I don’t know why, but I’m not complaining!] I received my copies the other day here in Chicago. More information. A couple of devoted souls even bought it on Amazon (despite the price!). (It was ranked about 8 million a week ago.) My thanks!…

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  • More on recent “grounding” formulations of legal positivism that exclude Hans Kelsen

    Scott Shapiro did the most to popularize a misleading way of describing legal positivism. (The mistake derives from Greenberg and Gideon Rosen, but Shapiro’s 2011 book helped make it common among American legal philosophers, most of whom are not burdened by knowing anything about the history of the subject and, in many cases, have never…

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  • Muhammad Ali Khalidi and Liam Murphy (hereafter K&M) on “Disagreement about the kind law”

    This paper by K&M appeared in Jurisprudence 12 (2021): 1-16. The main contribution of the paper is in section 4, which argues, quite plausibly, for the view that law is dependent on (at least some) people having the concept of law. This is a significant improvement on a related point that Alex Langlinais and I…

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  • Kelsen and “grounding” versions of legal positivism

    The current American fad (which I write about critically in Chapter 9 of my forthcoming book) of characterizing legal positivism as the view that “legal facts are grounded in social facts” has as one of its many ironies that the other major 20th-century legal positivist, Hans Kelsen, rejects it (Hart as I argue, does not…

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  • Richard Stillman on the problem of theoretical disagreements

    This will only interest my legal philosophy readers, but I do want to commend to their attention this paper by Richard Stillman, who trained as a philosopher of language with Stephen Neale before coming to Chicago to study law (and jurisprudence). He has identified something important about at least one subset of theoretical disagreements in…

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  • Some questions and doubts about Greenberg’s “Moral Impact Theory of Law”

    (The following grew out of a discussion with two Chicago students doing an "independent study" in advanced general jurisprudence:  3L Courtney Cox and 2L Phil Smoke.  They are not responsible for what follows, but I was helped by discussing the paper with them.) Mark Greenberg (UCLA) has recently published a paper that synthesizes some of…

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  • Priel on “Towards Classical Legal Positivism”

    Dan Priel (Osgoode) has posted a draft of this paper on SSRN.  I assume it's an early draft, since there's lots of rhetorical excess and overreaching, and associated carelessness, but there is a core idea that is interesting and prima facie plausible and deserves attention and development.  The idea is this:  the "classical" positivists like Hobbes and…

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  • The Internal Point of View Strikes Again!

    From The New Yorker, July 11 & 18, 2011, "The Financial Page:  Dodger Mania," about corruption and tax cheats in Greece: Greek citizens also have what social scientists call very low "tax morale."  In most developed countrie, tax-compliance rates are much higher than a calculation of risks would imply.  We don't pay our taxes just…

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  • This blog coming back to life (a bit)

    I'm going to transfer content from the old legal philosophy blog that still seems to me of interest (I'll skip all the polls and non-substantive items), and will periodically use this site as a place to make notes to myself about issues that come up in my work.   I do find myself going back to some…

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  • On Raz’s Claim that an Authoritative Directive Must be Someone’s View about What Ought to be Done

    (These thoughts were prompted by an extremely acute question in jurisprudence by Lisa Christensen Gee, a 2L here at Chicago.) I was teaching for the umpteenth time Joseph Raz's important 1985 paper "Authority, Law, and Morality" (ALM) from The Monist.   Dialectically, it comes in as follows in the basic jurisprudence course I teach.   (I will give…

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  • Green on Legal Realism and Naturalized Jurisprudence

    Via Solum, I learn that my (part-time) colleague Les Green's (long-gestating) paper on "Law and the Causes of Judicial Decision" is finally on SSRN (it will appear in final form in Green's forthcoming collection of papers from OUP).  I have a number of quibbles about Leiter interpretation (the most important is that I've noted since at…

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  • Perry on Raz, Authority and Anarchsim

    I am grateful to those who turned out at 9 am on a Sunday morning (!!!) to an "Author Meets Critics" session at the Eastern APA on my book Naturalizing Jurisprudence (OUP, 2007) and especially to Thom Brooks (Newcastle), the organizer, and Stephen Perry (Penn), the commentator.  (Sadly, the other commentator, Ken Himma [Seattle Pacific] was…

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  • Waldron on the Prohibition of Hate Speech

    Jeremy Waldron (NYU) has a quite interesting piece about freedom of speech in the current New York Review of (Each Other's) Books.  (We've remarked previously on the general decline of the NY Review; one of the few bright spots lately have been Waldron's essays–one early piece of uncritical sycophancy excluded–which are refreshingly non-parochial and intelligent). …

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  • Authorities that Perform a “Partial Service”: An Objection to Raz’s Objection to Soft Positivism?

    Here is a puzzle Mark Greenberg (UCLA) and I have been discussing, which we have shared with some legal philosophers on e-mail, and thought we would post here: Raz argues that in order for law to have the capacity to be authoritative, its directives must satisfy the following condition:  "it must be possible to identify…

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  • An Epistemological Puzzle about Legal Positivism?

    The puzzle is due to Mark Greenberg (UCLA), who suggested it in conversation the other day (when we were discussing this paper of mine).  (Greenberg is spending the calendar year 2007 at UT Austin.)  I'll give my rendition of it, and then sketch what I take to be some possible answers. According to the positivist,…

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  • This Blog Has Moved!

    The new site is here.

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  • This Blog is Going to Move

    I’m going to move the URL for the blog (by the end of August), hence the dearth of follow-up posts.  The new URL will be posted here, and I’ll also link to it from my main philosophy and law school blogs.  Thanks for your patience.

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  • Simpson’s “The Common Law and Legal Theory”

    A couple of years ago, Leslie Green and I had a spirited exchange in the pages of the Times Literary Supplement with A.W.B. Simpson about his hatchet job on H.L.A. Hart, delivered under the guise of a review of Nicola Lacey’s fine biography.  Like some other reviews of Hart’s biography–I am thinking especially of Thomas…

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  • This Blog and Its Purpose

    I am going to use this blog to post some thoughts about issues in legal philosophy that I’m working on–papers or books I’m reading, talks I attend or give, problems I’m working through.  The posts will be "thinking out loud" in the sense that they won’t be polished or heavily revised, and thus no doubt…

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