The Empire Strikes Back

This is a reply to La Torre’s criticisms of Anglo-American conceptual jurisprudence, which appeared in this journal as “The Law for Itself: Plea for a Pragmatic Jurisprudence.”1 I argue that he misconceives the fundaments of conceptual jurisprudence, as grounded in the works of Hart, Austin, and Dworkin. I then consider the various interpretations of the deontic operator should and show that none of them do any work in defense of the claim that conceptual jurisprudence should not be done. Next, I show that “pragmatic jurisprudence” is already being done on a wide scale and amounts to nothing more novel than conceptual re-engineering, which depends critically on the methodology for descriptive conceptual analysis. The essay concludes with a discussion of the possible motivations of these critiques of the project

Conceptual history · Empire · Jurisprudence · Normative · Nothing · Plea · Evolving Legal Systems and Governance · Law in Society and Culture · Philosophical Ethics and Theory