Why, then, has Anglo-American jurisprudence remained staunchly indifferent to history? How has it been able to maintain its confident assumption that the analytical and the historical can be neatly...

This paper defends the explanatory priority for the general descriptive theory of law of an investigation into law’s normative point over an investigation of law’s other central features. The paper begins by clarifying the normative priority thesis and implications of the assertion that law has a normative point. It then develops, in Section II, two arguments in favour of the priority thesis. Section III demonstrates the explanatory power of the law’s normative point priority thesis by reference to the related, but (...) derivative, problem of the normativity of legal directives. (shrink)

Natural law theories affirm that it belongs to the nature of law to be apt to promote the common good or do something similar. I defend a weak version of this thesis according to which part of what constitutes something as a nondefective central case of a posited law is that it is apt to promote the common good. Just as the rules of Pictionary require the drawing player to design her drawing to reveal the word in play, the rules (...) of a central case of a legal system require lawmakers to design laws to promote the common good. Therefore, just as a Pictionary drawing that is inapt to reveal the word in play is defective, a central case of a posited law that is inapt to promote the common good is defective. (shrink)

In a recent article entitled, “Is General Jurisprudence Interesting?”, David Enoch answers his own question resoundingly in the negative. This article critically examines the character of Enoch’s claim, the presuppositions it rests on, and the way in which he seeks to establish it. Having argued that many of Enoch’s views in this regard hinge on a narrow and idiosyncratic understanding of the questions that general jurisprudence addresses, and of the relations between those questions and many other inquiries concerning the character (...) of law, the article concludes by offering its author’s own vision of what makes general jurisprudence engaging, intriguing, and... well... interesting. (shrink)