The Limited Domain of the Law

Author(s): Frederick Schauer

Source: Virginia Law Review , Nov., 2004, Vol. 90, No. 7 (Nov., 2004), pp. 1909-1956
Published by: Virginia Law Review

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THE LIMITED DOMAIN OF THE LAW

Frederick Schauer*

I. THE METHODS OF JURISPRUDENCE ........................................ 1910

II. THE LIMITED DOMAIN HYPOTHESIS ...................................... 1914
III. UNRAVELING THE RULE OF RECOGNITION ........................... 1918
IV. THE LIMITED DOMAIN AND THE CORE OF AMERICAN
LEGAL THEORY .......................................................... 1922
V. LIMITED DOMAINS AND THE DIFFERENTIATION OF LAW .... 1928
VI. TESTING THE LIMITED DOMAIN HYPOTHESIS-THE
NATURE OF JURISPRUDENTIAL INQUIRY REVISITED ........... 1933
VII. WHITHER POSITIVISM? ........................................................... 1942
CONCLUSION-UNDERSTANDING THE DIFFERENTIATION OF
LAW .......................................................... 1955

IS law a limited domain? Are legal argument and judicial deci-

sionmaking constrained by norms of decision that make consid-
erations of morality, policy, and politics that would otherwise be
part of a wise decision unavailable to the legal system? Do lawyers
and judges operate in an environment constricted by the legal sys-
tem's relative unwillingness or inability to look at facts, norms, and
values routinely available to other decisionmakers? Are some ar-
guments acceptable in the larger society presumptively unaccept-
able in the institution we call "law"?
The question whether the domain of law is limited in this way,
although rarely couched in such terms, lies at the center of many of
the most important jurisprudential debates of the past hundred
years. Indeed, almost all the major American contributions to legal
theory during that period can be understood to challenge the view

*Frank Stanton Professor of the First Amendment, John F. Kennedy School of

Government, Harvard University. An earlier version of this Article was presented at
the University of Texas Colloquium on Constitutional and Legal Theory, and a still
earlier one to the Faculty of Law at the Australian National University. I am grateful
to the participants on those occasions, as well as to Larry Alexander, Mitch Berman,
Brian Bix, Brian Leiter, Sandy Levinson, Dennis Patterson, Jerry Postema, Larry
Sager, and Scott Shapiro for perceptive and helpful comments.

1909

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 1910 Virginia Law Review [Vol. 90:1909

that law is or should be a limited domain, and the substantial over-

lap among otherwise diverse perspectives on just this point might
even suggest that the claim of law as a limited domain is no longer
to be taken seriously. Yet not only should the claim be taken seri-
ously, it may even be right. At the heart of understanding the phe-
nomenon of law and the character of legal argument may be an
appreciation of the fundamental narrowness of the law and a grasp
of the way in which the characteristic modalities of law serve to
screen out, often successfully, what would in other decisional set-
tings be good arguments, important facts, and desirable values.
My goal is to examine the proposition that law is a limited do-
main through the lens of the most visible controversies in analytic
jurisprudence in the last half century. As will become apparent,
neither those controversies nor the tools of analytic jurisprudence
alone can settle the issue, but they illuminate the important con-
nection among the various perspectives seeking to challenge or to
endorse a limited domain understanding of law. At the end of the
day we may not be able to determine conclusively whether law in
fact is a limited domain, but, if I am successful, we will see why
framing the issue in this way helps so much in understanding the
phenomenon of law and the character of legal reasoning.

I. THE METHODS OF JURISPRUDENCE

In the Preface to The Concept of Law, H.L.A. Hart describes his

book as an exercise in "descriptive sociology."' And more than
four decades after the book's publication, scholars of jurisprudence
still ponder over the meaning of Hart's curious claim2 -curious be-
cause The Concept of Law, however well entrenched in the canons
of analytic jurisprudence and the philosophy of law, would hardly
be regarded by professional sociologists as the kind of inquiry with
which they are at all familiar.

'H.L.A. Hart, The Concept of Law, at v (2d ed. 1994).

2 See, e.g., Neil MacCormick, H.L.A. Hart 5 (1981); Gerald J. Postema, Jurispru-
dence as Practical Philosophy, 4 Legal Theory 329, 330-35 (1998); Ronald Dworkin,
Thirty Years On, 115 Harv. L. Rev. 1655, 1680 (2002) (book review) [hereinafter
Dworkin, Thirty Years On].

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 2004] The Limited Domain of the Law 1911

Yet although Hart's work appears primarily philosophical and

not much sociological, there is a point to his insistence that his task
is one of descriptive sociology. Part of this point, according to Hart
himself, emerges from the main themes of 1940s and 1950s ordi-
nary language philosophy, an approach most associated with the
Oxford philosopher J.L. Austin,4 but one in which Hart should be
seen as a central figure and not merely a follower of others.5 As
perceived by its proponents, ordinary language philosophy in-
volved the close examination of the ideas and distinctions embed-
ded in our language in order to reveal underlying and important
features of the world. Quoting Austin, Hart maintained that he was
using "a sharpened awareness of words to sharpen our perception
of the phenomena."6 The analysis of ordinary language was thus a
means and not an end, and indeed arguably not about language at
all in the sense in which philosophers of language study language
itself.7 Rather, ordinary language was the window into the phe-

'For an attempt to erect a bridge between Hart's project and what sociologists
would recognize as sociology, see Martin Krygier, The Concept of Law and Social
Theory, 2 Oxford J. Legal Stud. 155 (1982).
4 Most of the relevant corpus of Austin's work is in J.L. Austin, How to Do Things
with Words (J.O. Urmson ed., 1962); J.L. Austin, Philosophical Papers (J.O. Urmson
& G.J. Warnock eds., 1961); and J.L. Austin, Sense and Sensibilia (G.J. Warnock ed.,
1962).
5A useful bit of evidence for this proposition is that Austin, in providing examples
of what he called "performative" utterances-expressions whose very utterance pro-
duced operative consequences-often used examples drawn from the law, such as "I
bequeath" in a will and "I hereby pronounce you husband and wife" at a wedding. In
light of Hart's roughly contemporaneous concern with the operative and constitutive
aspects of legal language, it is not unreasonable to infer that many of Austin's legal
examples, and perhaps even the basic idea itself, came from Austin's friend and col-
league Hart. See H.L.A. Hart, Definition and Theory in Jurisprudence (1953) [here-
inafter Hart, Definition and Theory]; H.L.A. Hart, The Ascription of Responsibility
and Rights, 49 Proc. Aristotelian Soc'y 171 (1949).
6 Hart, supra note 1, at v, 14.
7Joseph Raz maintains that Hart's primary interest in Austin and ordinary language
philosophy was an attraction with speech-act theory, which was among the most
prominent aspects of Austin's philosophy of language. See Joseph Raz, Two Views of
the Nature of the Theory of Law: A Partial Comparison, 4 Legal Theory 249, 251-54
(1998). Yet although speech-act theory may be germane to Hart's view of legal lan-
guage, this is not what Hart himself claims is the sociological value of looking at lan-
guage to illuminate our understanding of the world. See Hart, Definition and Theory,
supra note 5, at 7-8. Nor does it much touch on Hart's famous analyses of ordinary
language, such as drawing a distinction between being obliged and having an obliga-
tion, and distinguishing between doing something as a rule and doing it because of a

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 1912 Virginia Law Review [Vol. 90:1909

nomena of which language is a part. In claiming that The Concept

of Law was an exercise in descriptive sociology, Hart is best under-
stood as maintaining that the language of the law and the language
used to talk about the law could, if scrutinized with sufficient in-
sight, support descriptive claims about the concept of law and
about how law actually functioned.
There is another sense in which Hart's work can be seen as so-
ciological. Hart was not only a speaker of English but had also,
prior to his academic career, spent nine years at the bar as an eq-
uity practitioner. This experience of seeing how law "really" oper-
ated, a less modest man might have urged, could yield insight into
the very nature of law. Hart's work is thus descriptive sociology not
only because of its use of the implicitly empirical methods of ordi-
nary language philosophy, but also because Hart's claims about the
central features of a legal system are driven as much by the obser-
vations of an insider to the system as by philosophical speculation.8
Although Ronald Dworkin has famously taken issue with Hart
about whether legal positivism can explain the law as we know it,9
in some important respects their methods are similar.'" Distancing
himself from the generations of jurisprudents who have debated

rule, analyses with only a tenuous connection with speech-act theory in particular and
the philosophy of language in general. See Hart, supra note 1, at 55-57, 82-83.
8 For the argument that Hart's project was possibly more normative and less de-
scriptive than Hart himself supposed, see Jules L. Coleman, Incorporationism,
Conventionality, and the Practical Difference Thesis, 4 Legal Theory 381, 387-95
(1998). In a series of articles, Stephen Perry offers an important analysis of the
methodological dimensions of Hart's work. Stephen R. Perry, Hart's Methodological
Positivism, 4 Legal Theory 427 (1998); Stephen R. Perry, Interpretation and
Methodology in Legal Theory, in Law and Interpretation: Essays in Legal Philosophy
97, 98-99 (Andrei Marmor ed., 1995); Stephen R. Perry, The Varieties of Legal
Positivism, 9 Can. J.L. & Jurisprudence 361, 362 (1996).
9 Ronald Dworkin, Law's Empire 31-44 (1986) [hereinafter Dworkin, Law's Em-
pire]; Ronald Dworkin, A Matter of Principle 131-37 (1985) [hereinafter Dworkin, A
Matter of Principle]; Ronald Dworkin, Taking Rights Seriously, at xii (1977) [herein-
after Dworkin, Taking Rights Seriously].
' There are, to be sure, important methodological differences between Hart and
Dworkin, particularly on the question whether a conceptual description or analysis of
the idea of law can be in any way neutral or value-free. See Ronald Dworkin, Hart's
Postscript and the Character of Political Philosophy, 24 Oxford J. Legal Stud. 1, 7-23
(2004). But the important contemporary debate about the possibility or desirability of
a descriptive, as opposed to a normative, account of the concept of law should not ob-
scure the way in which the accounts of both Hart and Dworkin contain significant de-
scriptive, and thus empirically falsifiable, components.

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 2004] The Limited Domain of the Law 1913

over the necessary and sufficient conditions of the concept of law

and the meaning of the word "law,""1 Dworkin has steadfastly re-
fused to provide such a definition. In a claim both dismissive and
profound, shallow and deep, Dworkin has often insisted that law is
simply what lawyers and judges do.'2 He sees his task as providing a
thick and philosophically informed description-sociological, if you
will-of what lawyers do when they argue cases and what judges do
when they decide them. Like Hart, Dworkin wants to describe law
from the inside.13 In a tradition going back at least as far as Emile
Durkheim,"4 he purports to offer a participant's view of the legal
system, albeit a view that might not be understood in as deep a way
by the participants themselves.'5

" On the methodological aspects of such inquiry, and on the distinction between
analyzing a concept and seeking to define the word that may (contingently) identify it,
see Raz, supra note 7, at 255. See also Brian Leiter, Beyond the Hart/Dworkin De-
bate: The Methodology Problem in Jurisprudence, 48 Am. J. Jurisprudence 17 (2003)
[hereinafter Leiter, Beyond the Hart/Dworkin Debate] (reconsidering the role of the
Hart-Dworkin debate in the twenty-first century); Leighton Moore, Description and
Analysis in The Concept of Law: A Response to Stephen Perry, 8 Legal Theory 91
(2002) (challenging Perry's reading of Hart).
12 Ronald Dworkin, A Reply by Ronald Dworkin, in Ronald Dworkin and Contem-
porary Jurisprudence 259, 261-63 (Marshall Cohen ed., 1984).
13 Dworkin, Law's Empire, supra note 9, at vii-viii.
14 Emile Durkheim, The Division of Labor in Society (George Simpson trans., The
Free Press, 1964) (1893).
15 Dworkin's inquiry is thus, in one sense of the word, "hermeneutic." See MacC
mick, supra note 2, at 37-40 (depicting law as seen by those who have, as Hart would
put it, an internal point of view); see also Raz, supra note 7, at 250 n.4 (responding t
MacCormick, noting Hart himself agreed with MacCormick's account of Hart's en-
terprise, but was somewhat troubled by the word "hermeneutic"); Brian Bix, H.L.A.
Hart and the Hermeneutic Turn in Legal Theory, 52 SMU L. Rev. 167 (1999); Rich-
ard Holton, Positivism and the Internal Point of View, 17 L. & Phil. 597 (1998); Tho-
mas Morawetz, Law as Experience: Theory and the Internal Aspect of Law, 52 SMU
L. Rev. 27 (1999); Brian Z. Tamanaha, The Internal/External Distinction and the No-
tion of a "Practice" in Legal Theory and Sociolegal Studies, 30 L. & Soc'y Rev. 163
(1996). Whether the internal point of view is necessarily a more accurate account of
the nature and functions of an institution is an open question, and it is not clear that
legal insiders like lawyers and judges can provide a "better" account of law than can
those who observe it from outside or who are affected by its outputs. Holmes's "bad
man" may not be able to tell us all that is interesting about law, but neither can
Dworkin's good judge Hercules, because there is no a priori reason to believe that an
insider's account of an institution is necessarily more accurate, and thus should be
more privileged, than an outsider's account. After all, insiders may, just because they
are insiders, have biases and misperceptions that are no less consequential than the
biases and misperceptions that outsiders have just because they are outsiders. More-
over, we might distinguish between an insider's understanding of what law is and an

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 1914 Virginia Law Review [Vol. 90:1909

II. THE LIMITED DOMAIN HYPOTHESIS

Dworkin's examination of legal practice may thus have a phi-

losophical style, but we see that its premise likewise rests on de-
scriptive sociological claims.'6 The sociological goals of Hart and
Dworkin, shared even in the face of profound disagreement, might
thus suggest that descriptive sociological ambitions need not be
alien to the jurisprudential task, even the analytic philosophical
jurisprudential task. To understand the phenomenon of law and
the behavior of its inhabitants, we need an accurate empirical un-
derstanding of the legal enterprise, without which we cannot hope
to analyze even its normative and philosophical aspects.'7 My goal
here is to further the enterprise of descriptive jurisprudential socio-
logical inquiry by examining the hypothesis of law as a limited do-
main, a hypothesis that Hart may too quickly (even if silently) have
assumed, and that Dworkin may too quickly have rejected.'8
By examining the possibility that law is a limited domain, I con-
sider the proposition that there are in most advanced legal systems

account, not necessarily an insider's account, of what commitments insiders, especially

judges and perhaps also lawyers, need to have in order for a mature legal system to
exist. Both Hart and Dworkin are engaged in both of these projects, but the projects
are nevertheless distinct.
16 Conceptual claims, maintaining that this or that idea best captures the core of
some concept or word, are in some sense descriptive, at least if we understand the
universe of the descriptive as encompassing all that is not normative. But if concep-
tual claims are one species of descriptive claims, then genuinely empirical claims,
claims that depend on facts about the world as opposed to facts about language or
ideas, are another species. My point is that Hart and Dworkin can both be understood
as making claims that are empirical in just this way. On these and related issues, see
Brian Leiter, Realism, Hard Positivism, and Conceptual Analysis, 4 Legal Theory 533
(1998).
17 See Dennis M. Patterson, Law's Practice, 90 Colum. L. Rev. 575 (1990) (book re-
view).
18 In ways that will become clearer as the argument develops, I do not understand
the project of jurisprudence as exclusively philosophical, although I am as concerned
as others with the extent to which a virtually unlimited range of inquiries parades un-
der the jurisprudential banner. See Michael Moore, Hart's Concluding Scientific Post-
script, 4 Legal Theory 301, 301 (1998). Although I take jurisprudential inquiry to be
significantly and desirably philosophical, I do not understand a philosophical focus as
precluding related empirical jurisprudential inquiry, and I believe, with Dworkin, that
jurisprudential inquiry can be focused on particular legal systems or particular fami-
lies of legal systems. So although I acknowledge the value of purely conceptual in-
quiry, I resist the view that jurisprudence is necessarily, only, or perhaps even largely
about specifying the essential features of the concept of law in all possible legal sys-
tems in all possible worlds.

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 2004] The Limited Domain of the Law 1915

a substantial quantity of otherwise valid social norms, or otherwise

valid sources of decision, that law refuses to accept.19 If law is a lim-
ited decisional domain, arguments permissible in other and larger
domains become impermissible in law.20 Just as a baseball umpire is
precluded from accepting otherwise good arguments that a World
Series victory for the Boston Red Sox might mean more (for ex-
ample, produce greater utility or reward better behavior) for its
fans than a New York Yankees victory would for the Yankees and
its fans, law may be a domain in which otherwise acceptable moral,
political, and policy arguments are unavailable, not because they
are bad arguments, but rather because they are beyond the
boundaries-out of play, if you will-of the institution of law.
The limited domain claim is both empirical and a matter of de-
gree. Law may be more or less a limited domain, and the interest
lies in the "more" or the "less." Although Joseph Raz says that the

19 Although I use the word "valid," I want to bracket important meta-ethical issues
about what makes a prelegal or nonlegal argument or norm valid. Although I believe
that prelegal norms are valid if and only if they are right, others would locate the va-
lidity of a social norm in its community acceptance, its pragmatic value, or perhaps
even in something else. These are vitally important issues, but they are not my issues,
and I use the word "valid" only to draw the distinction between what an agent or in-
stitution would find usable in the nonlegal environment and what that same agent or
institution would find usable in the domain of the law.
20The reverse is true as well. Another aspect of the claim that law is a limited do-
main, although in some tension with the ordinary meaning of the word "limited," is
that law not only makes irrelevant otherwise relevant arguments, but that it also
makes relevant otherwise irrelevant ones. Arguments from precedent may be good
examples of this phenomenon, because a strong argument from precedent provides an
otherwise unavailable reason for a decisionmaker to reach what that decisionmaker
believes to be an erroneous conclusion. See Larry Alexander, Constrained by Prece-
dent, 63 S. Cal. L. Rev. 1 (1989); Frederick Schauer, Precedent, 39 Stan. L. Rev. 571
(1987). Indeed, not only do arguments from precedent have this character, but so also
do arguments from authority in general since such arguments make mandatory or op-
tional considerations that might otherwise be impermissible. On such "inclusionary"
reasons, see Frederick Schauer, Playing By the Rules: A Philosophical Examination
of Rule-Based Decision-Making in Law and in Life 91-92 (1991). See also J. Raz,
Reasons for Action, Decisions and Norms, 84 Mind 481 (1975). This is true for argu-
ments from precedent particularly and authority generally, but the concentration of
such arguments in law-their presumptive desirability in law and their comparative
scarcity outside of it-may be a significant part of the special character of legal rea-
soning. See John Finnis, On "The Critical Legal Studies Movement," in Oxford Es-
says in Jurisprudence: Third Series 145, 148-50 (John Eekelaar & John Bell eds.,
1987).

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 1916 Virginia Law Review [Vol. 90:1909

limited domain "thesis" is trivially true,2' his assertion rests on the

mistaken assumption that the question of law being a limited do-
main is a conceptual one, and thus a "thesis" capable of being sup-
ported or rejected by logical argument alone. To the contrary, the
limited domain question is not whether the set of legal norms is to-
tally coincident with the set of all norms, for nowhere is that the
case. It is indeed trivially true that law is, as a conceptual matter, a
limited domain. But beyond the trivial truth lie important ques-
tions about the extent of divergence. A legal system in which only a
tiny fraction of society's moral, political, and practical norms are
cognizable as law or usable in the legal system is noticeably differ-
ent from one in which the bulk of such norms are legally eligible as
well,22 and it is along this axis that we locate the interest in law as a
limited domain. Questions of "how much" are no less interesting or
less jurisprudential because they invite inquiry as to matters of de-
gree. When we ask whether law is slightly or greatly a limited do-
main we thus ask a question whose answer takes us far towards
understanding what law does and how it does it.
To clarify the inquiry further, the hypothesis of law as a limited
domain is not restricted to the realm of arguments or norms in any
narrow sense. Legal outcomes are based on facts as well as on ar-
guments, and part of the limited domain hypothesis asserts that the
practices of the law render immaterial many facts that would oth-
erwise be available in the larger environment. Were a member of
Congress to be told that a bill she is proposing would cause a
greater decrease in wealth in Europe than it would an increase in
her own district, she would more likely respond "So what?" than
engage in cross-national cost-benefit analysis. And that is because
she understands her responsibilities in a limited way, recognizing
that some facts lie beyond her domain. To the extent that law is a
limited domain, there exist not only arguments and norms but also
facts, data, methods, and much else that the law refuses to recog-

21 Joseph Raz, Postema on Law's Autonomy and Public Practical Reasons: A Criti-
cal Comment, 4 Legal Theory 1, 7 (1998).
22 Raz and others, "cognizable as law" and "usable in the legal system" are two
crucially different things, although to Dworkin they are largely the same. I address
this question in Part VII, infra, and I gloss over it here not because it is unimportant
but because it is best delayed until the basic distinction between more and less limited
domains is in place.

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 2004] The Limited Domain of the Law 1917

nize, not because they are wrong or invalid, but b

not part of legal decisionmaking. Although making
ment or method legitimately cognizable requires some norm, it is
still useful to emphasize that the limited domain hypothesis is
about the full range of decisional inputs, and not just about norms,
rules, or arguments. The hypothesis of law as a limited domain is,
at bottom, a claim about the concept and scope of legal cognition.
Much in Hart's work might be understood (though perhaps not
by Hart) as assuming that law is just such a limited domain. By
identifying the idea of a "rule of recognition," The Concept of Law
can be interpreted (which is a claim about a text and not about its
author's mental state23) as presupposing that rules of recognition
distinguish the norms or sources (or anything else) of the law from
the norms and sources available in the larger society.24 It is, to be
sure, logically possible for some legal system's rule of recognition
to recognize as law virtually any norm, source, value, or fact that its
society recognized as legitimate, because the concept of a rule of
recognition is agnostic about what a particular rule of recognition
might recognize as law. But however logically possible such a rule
of recognition might be, taking this logical possibility as important
seems inconsistent (although suggestions in Hart's Postscript imply
otherwise25) with the tenor of Hart's emphasis on the very idea of a
rule of recognition, and also on the idea of legal validity. If the
most familiar rules of recognition actually recognized as law all
that the larger society recognized, and if as a consequence all (or

23 One finds too many references in modern analytic jurisprudential writing to what
Hart said on this or that occasion, typically used to buttress the author's analysis of
the meaning of The Concept of Law. Although Hart was one of the giants of legal
theory and also a very nice man, neither of those facts privileges his understanding of
his own text, any more than would be the case for James Madison's views about the
meaning of the Constitution, or Pablo Picasso's about Guernica.
24 The claim in the text is not inconsistent with Jules Coleman's views about the
"epistemic" function that a rule of recognition might serve. Jules L. Coleman, Mar-
kets, Morals and the Law 3, 5 (1988); Jules L. Coleman, Negative and Positive Positiv-
ism, 11 J. Legal Stud. 139, 141 (1982) [hereinafter Coleman, Negative and Positive
Positivism]; see also Jules L. Coleman, The Practice of Principle: In Defence of a
Pragmatist Approach to Legal Theory (2001) [hereinafter Coleman, The Practice of
Principle].
25 I refer here largely to Hart's tentative embrace of what he in his Postscript calls
"soft positivism." Hart, The Concept of Law, supra note 1, at 250-54. For extensive
discussion of just this claim by Hart, see Hart's Postscript: Essays on the Postscript to
The Concept of Law (Jules Coleman ed., 2001).

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 1918 Virginia Law Review [Vol. 90:1909

even most) socially valid arguments were also legally valid argu-
ments, the emphasis on both legal validity and legal rules of recog-
nition would be surprising. More plausibly, Hart seems to assume,
even if not to assert, that although the concept of the rule of recog-
nition allows a rule of recognition to be so capacious that the do-
main of law overlaps substantially with the domain of everything
else, in actual advanced legal systems the set of norms recognized
by the rule(s) of recognition is but a comparatively small subset of
the set of norms recognized by society. When this is the case, the
set of inputs the law permits is nowhere near coextensive with the
set permitted throughout society, and real rules of recognition ac-
tually recognize a domain far smaller than the total domain of so-
cial norms and social facts.26 There is a difference between the con-
cept of a rule of recognition and the point of spending so much time
thinking about it. Under this understanding of the point of focusing
on a rule of recognition, then, The Concept of Law can be seen as
likely motivated by the empirical belief, inter alia, that law as we
know it is a limited domain.

III. UNRAVELING THE RULE OF RECOGNITION

If a belief in the existence of law's limited domain explains at

least some of the point of focusing on the idea of a rule of recogni-
tion, Hart can be understood as quietly assuming the descriptive
sociological proposition that the recognition apparatus of a typical
modern legal system refuses to acknowledge as legal an apprecia-
ble number of the facts, norms, and sources deemed valid in other

26This interpretation of Hart is different from but not inconsistent with Scott
Shapiro's view that Hart was particularly concerned with law's guidance function. See
Scott J. Shapiro, The Difference That Rules Make, in Analyzing Law: New Essays in
Legal Theory 33, 34-40 (Brian Bix ed., 1998); Scott J. Shapiro, On Hart's Way Out, 4
Legal Theory 469 (1998). When Shapiro, referring to what he calls law's "designa-
tion" role, notes that "[g]iven the myriad of norms that might compete for our alle-
giance, the law designates certain rules as those to which we are required to con-
form," he presupposes that the domain of legal norms is both smaller and more
accessible than the domain of "myriad" social norms of all sorts. Shapiro, On Hart's
Way Out, supra, at 491. So, although Shapiro's account of the relationship between
the domain of legal norms and the domain of all norms is more functional than the
one I offer here, our understandings of Hart's basic point are largely consistent with
each other.

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2004] The Limited Domain of the Law 1919

parts of society.27 Moreover, Hart is plausibly interpreted as believ-

ing that the non-recognition of a fact, source, or norm as legal
makes a genuine difference to legal practice. Unlike Hans Kelsen,
who insisted that the "pure theory of law" could not explain all
that lawyers and judges did,29 and who stressed that all instances of
legal argument and legal decision contained nonlegal elements-
that no legal decision was completely determined by the law-Hart
seemed concerned with saying something more important about
legal and judicial practice (even though he was not concerned with
providing a theory of adjudication) than is captured by the purity
of the Kelsenian inquiry.30 After all, lawyers and judges need also
to know the language of the society in which they work, the rules
of grammar and syntax, the basics of arithmetic, a large number of
widely accepted social facts, and much else. To maintain that there
is something that lawyers and judges do that does not exhaust their
professional practice is thus not to say something very interesting
or controversial. Rather, Hart's claim about a rule of recognition,
while not inconsistent with the view that the facts, norms, and
sources recognized by a rule of recognition do not explain all of
what lawyers and judges do, becomes an important tool for under-

27 I use the words "sociology" and "sociological" only because Hart did, and I have
neither interest nor competence in marking the boundaries between sociological in-
quiry and other forms of empirical inquiry in the social sciences.
28 Jules Coleman maintains, correctly in my view, that Hart is committed to the
Practical Difference Thesis, "the claim that, in order to be law, authoritative pro-
nouncements must in principle be capable of making a practical difference: a differ-
ence, that is, in the structure or content of deliberation and action." Coleman, supra
note 8, at 383. I agree with Coleman's interpretation of Hart but go further, believing
that Hart was also likely motivated by (which is not the same as "committed to") a
belief that the rule of recognition made an actual difference, and not just a difference
in principle, in the structure of and sources for deliberation and action in the legal sys-
tems with which he was most familiar.
29Hans Kelsen, General Theory of Law and State 146 (A. Wedberg trans., 1945)
("The judge is, therefore, always a legislator also in the sense that the contents of his
decision never can be completely determined by the preexisting norm of substantive
law."); Hans Kelsen, Pure Theory of Law 349 (Max Knight trans., 1967) ("Every law-
applying act is only partly determined by law ....").
It is important to emphasize, however, that Kelsen saw his goal as one of offering
explanations about legal theory and legal cognition and neither about law as a prac-
tice nor about the argumentation of lawyers and the decisions of judges. As lain
Stewart felicitously expresses it, Kelsen purports to give us a pure theory of law, but
not a theory of pure law. lain Stewart, Kelsen and the Exegetical Tradition, in Essays
on Kelsen 123, 127 (Richard Tur & William Twining eds., 1986).

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 1920 Virginia Law Review [Vol. 90:1909

standing actual legal practices only if coupled with the descriptive

claim, one that Kelsen neither affirmed nor denied, that a focus on
"the law" usefully differentiates the professional activities of law-
yers and judges from the activities of other sorts of folk.
It is this claim-that what most of the important modern rules of
recognition actually recognize is a noticeably limited domain-that
Dworkin is best understood as seeking to deny. With a number of
well-chosen examples, most famously Riggs v. Palmer31 and Hen-
ningsen v. Bloomfield Motors,32 Dworkin posits that actual legal
argument and actual judicial decisionmaking turn crucially on
norms that are not previously part of an identified set of legally
recognized (or "pedigreed," to use Dworkin's term for norms rec-
ognized by a rule of recognition on the basis of their provenance-
source-and not their content) legal norms. He argues that the use
of norms drawn from the universe of social principles and moral
values is so prominent a feature of actual legal decisionmaking that
no account of law can be satisfactory unless it explains this
phenomenon. Moreover, Dworkin not only claims that many of the
norms used in legal decisionmaking are not pedigreed, but also that
they are not pedigreeable. Because of the nature of moral argu-
ment and moral disagreement, he argues, the idea of a source-
based rule of recognition for the moral (and political) principles
that pervade legal decisionmaking is impossible. Thus, he con-
cludes, the looming presence of morality in actual legal
decisionmaking is such that neither a rule of recognition nor the
idea of law as a limited domain can provide an accurate descriptive
account of advanced modern adjudicatory practices.
Although it is Dworkin who is most prominently associated with
denying any account of legal decisionmaking that stresses rule-of-
recognition-recognized legal norms, the broader attack comes from
Melvin Eisenberg. As is well known, Dworkin has long main-
tained that lawyers and courts occupy the forum of principle, with
the fact-based and largely utilitarian forum of policy lying outside

31 22 N.E. 188 (N.Y. 1889).

2 161 A.2d 69 (N.J. 1960).
33 Melvin Aron Eisenberg, The Nature of the Common Law (1988). A broader ex-
planation of the role of fact-based policy considerations in common law adjudication
can be found in John Bell, Policy Arguments in Judicial Decisions (1983).

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2004] The Limited Domain of the Law 1921

the domain of the law.34 Insofar as this demarcation between prin-

ciple and policy is one way of understanding law's domain as lim-
ited, then Dworkin, even while insisting that the domain of princi-
ple is not limited to legal principles in contrast to the larger set of
social, political, and moral ones, can be understood as still endors-
ing a mild version of the claim that law is a limited domain.35 By
contrast, Eisenberg, using a larger array of examples, expands on
even Dworkin's claim by arguing that it is in "the nature of the
common law" that its rules are often set aside not only in the ser-
vice of nonlegal principles of community recognized morality but
also by nonlegal policy arguments.36 However powerful Dworkin's
distinction between policy and principle might be as a prescriptive
matter, Eisenberg argues, as a descriptive proposition it is false, for
common law decisionmaking draws on nonpedigreed arguments
from policy as well as on nonpedigreed arguments from principle.37

" Dworkin, A Matter of Principle, supra note 9, at 33-71; Dworkin, Law's Empire,
supra note 9, at 221-24; Dworkin, Taking Rights Seriously, supra note 9, at 90-100.
5 In Law's Empire, Dworkin provides his most sustained defense of the interpretive
methodology that he believes best depicts American legal and judicial practice.
Dworkin, Law's Empire, supra note 9. But Dworkin remains elusive on the contours
of the domain of material that a judge is expected to interpret. The concept of inter-
pretation, and for that matter Dworkin's own conception of interpretation, is in the-
ory agnostic on the question of what it is that the interpreter should be interpreting.
Indeed, it could (although not to Dworkin) be the case that the set of raw materials to
be interpreted is a set consisting solely of pedigreed legal materials to which the judge
is then expected to apply Dworkinian interpretive methods. At the other extreme
would be an approach in which such methods are applied to the entire universe of so-
cial facts and social norms. Dworkin's view that what is being interpreted is an undif-
ferentiated universe of society's political decisions is consistent with his view that the
idea of "existing law" is descriptively inaccurate, and consistent with understanding
the target of his attack in limited domain terms. See Dworkin, Taking Rights Seri-
ously, supra note 9, at 293 (2d ed. 1978). Whether Dworkin's understanding of the
domain to be interpreted is descriptively correct, however, is another matter, one that
will be the focus of Part VI, infra.
3bEisenberg distinguishes legal from social propositions, and explains that social
propositions, including but not limited to moral propositions, play a large role in
common law decisionmaking. Eisenberg, supra note 33, at 14-42.
17 On the use of social propositions to produce change in doctrinal propositions
Eisenberg, supra note 33, at 64-76, 146-61.

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 1922 Virginia Law Review [Vol. 90:1909

IV. THE LIMITED DOMAIN AND THE CORE OF AMERICAN LEGAL

THEORY

The debates among Hart, Dworkin, and Eisenberg sharpen the

issue, but the question whether law is a limited domain is far larger
and far older. Both Dworkin and Eisenberg focus on common law
decisionmaking rather than statutory interpretation, for example,
but a rich literature, with Guido Calabresi's A Common Law for
the Age of Statutes as the capstone, maintains that even statutes
both are and should be less circumscribing than is often assumed.38
If statutes are treated by common law courts as data and not as
commands39 and if statutes are thus merely one element of a more
holistic enterprise of lawyerly argument and judicial decisionmak-
ing, it is no longer clear that even statutes create much of a limited
domain of legal inquiry. If statutory interpretation is understood as
a "dynamic" enterprise in which factors well beyond linguistic
meaning and the mental states of the drafters play a large role,4
the range of such factors is as large when dealing with a statute as
Dworkin and Eisenberg claim it is when dealing with the common
law, and if a statute in a common law country is just one more da-
tum to be considered by a common law judge, then we again begin
to lose a sense of a pedigreed set of legal norms demarcated from
other norms by a rule of recognition, and we begin to lose the
sense that law is a limited domain. For modern critics of textualist
or formalist approaches even to statutory interpretation, the proc-
ess of interpreting a statute is one in which a wide array of moral,
political, and policy materials and norms inform the interpretive
enterprise.41 To suppose that only or even largely the language of

3 Guido Calabresi, A Common Law for the Age of Statutes (1982).

'9 This understanding of the role of statutes is the pervasive theme of John Hamilto
Baker, The Law's Two Bodies: Some Evidential Problems in English Legal History
(2001).
40 See generally, William N. Eskridge, Jr., Dynamic Statutory Interpretation (1994);
T. Alexander Aleinikoff, Updating Statutory Interpretation, 87 Mich. L. Rev. 20
(1988).
41 See, e.g., William N. Eskridge, Jr. & Philip P. Frickey, Statutory Interpretation as
Practical Reasoning, 42 Stan. L. Rev. 321, 324-25 (1990) (arguing against primary re-
liance on text); Carlos E. Gonzalez, Reinterpreting Statutory Interpretation, 74 N.C.
L. Rev. 585, 718-29 (1996) (identifying policy discretion in statutory interpretation);
Nicholas S. Zeppos, Legislative History and the Interpretation of Statutes: Toward a
Fact-Finding Model of Statutory Interpretation, 76 Va. L. Rev. 1295 (1990) (criticiz-
ing textualism).

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2004] The Limited Domain of the Law 1923

the statute determines how it will be applied and interpreted, these

critics say, is to understate dramatically the role of a much larger
set of considerations influencing what judges in common law coun-
tries do with statutes.
Challenges to the idea of law as a limited domain are hardly lim-
ited to Dworkin, Eisenberg, and Calabresi; they pervade much of
twentieth-century American legal thought. The indeterminacy
strand of American Legal Realism is often mocked in "what the
judge had for breakfast" terms,42 but that is an uncharitable and in-
accurate way of thinking about the Realist perspective. When Jo-
seph Hutcheson described the "hunch" as the significant deter-
miner of judicial outcomes, with legal doctrine used to rationalize
ex post those outcomes that the hunch generated, he took pains to
emphasize that almost anything could inform the judicial hunch.43
Similarly, Jerome Frank's emphasis on the psychological side of
judging," an emphasis that did much to foster the "jurisprudenc
by breakfast" caricature of Realism, is best understood as an at-
tempt to lessen the distance, descriptively and prescriptively, be-
tween how a judge as a human being and that same human being
clothed in judicial robes would resolve a controversy. Frank's insis-
tence that the difference was wildly exaggerated in traditional legal
theory and legal education is but another way of challenging the
view of law as a limited domain; his goal was to emphasize that
judges use the same factors and insights as judges that they do in
nonlegal environments.
The same strain pervades even the more systematic versions of
Realism. Underhill Moore, the most scientific of the Realists, in-
sisted that actual empirical research into the determinants of legal
outcomes would show that formal legal doctrine played a relatively

42 See, e.g., Alex Kozinski, What I Ate for Breakfast and Other Mysteries of Judicia
Decision Making, in Judges on Judging: Views from the Bench 76 (David O'Brien ed.,
2d ed. 2004). For an analysis of the politics of the caricature and the larger politics of
the reception (or non-reception) of Realism, see Neil Duxbury, Some Radicalism
About Realism? Thurman Arnold and the Politics of Modern Jurisprudence, 10 Ox-
ford J. Legal Stud. 11 (1990).
43 Joseph C. Hutcheson, Jr., The Judgment Intuitive: The Function of the "Hunch"
in Judicial Decision, 14 Cornell L.Q. 274, 274 (1929); see also Charles M. Yablon, Jus-
tifying the Judge's Hunch: An Essay on Discretion, 41 Hastings L.J. 231 (1990).
4Jerome Frank, Law and the Modern Mind (1930); Jerome Frank, What Courts Do
in Fact, 26 Ill. L. Rev. 645 (1932).

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 1924 Virginia Law Review [Vol. 90:1909

small role, and that a larger array of social, psychological, and pol-
icy factors determined much of allegedly law-guided behavior.45
Herman Oliphant was similarly focused; his identification of pat-
terns of decision not found in the formal legal doctrine highlighted
the way that such patterns were more a function of unbounded pol-
icy determinations than of more bounded legal doctrine.46 In the
same vein, Felix Cohen urged research on the social forces and
backgrounds of judges that he believed determined legal outcomes,
for he too thought that in the largely unconstrained nature of such
forces and backgrounds lies the core of legal decisionmaking.47 Fi-
nally, Karl Llewellyn, stressing "situation sense" and lauding the
"grand style" of judging, insistently objected to seeing judges as fo-
cused only on doctrine, but urged them to bring within their com-
pass a large range of social, economic, and cultural factors.48 For
these and the other Realists, their core claim was that judges no
more than others can set aside whatever leads them to the best all-
things-considered judgment just because a legal norm (or set of le-
gal norms) directs them to disregard what they know to be relevant
to the decision at hand.49

45 Underhill Moore and Charles C. Callahan, Law and Learning Theory: A Study in
Legal Control, 53 Yale L.J. 1 (1943); see also John Henry Schlegel, American Legal
Realism and Empirical Social Science: The Singular Case of Underhill Moore, 29
Buff. L. Rev. 195 (1980).
46 Oliphant was concerned, as were most of the other Realists, not with showing
that the legal system's outcomes were indeterminate, but that the legal system's out-
comes did not track what had been traditionally thought of as legal reasons. Herman
Oliphant, Facts, Opinions, and Value-Judgments, 10 Tex. L. Rev. 127 (1932); Herman
Oliphant, A Return to Stare Decisis, 14 A.B.A. J. 71, 107, 159 (1928); see also Brian
Leiter, Legal Indeterminacy, 1 Legal Theory 481 (1995).
47 Felix S. Cohen, Transcendental Nonsense and the Functional Approach, 35
Colum. L. Rev. 809 (1935); see also Charles Grove Haines, General Observations on
the Effects of Personal. Political, and Economic Influences in the Decisions of Judges,
17 Ill. L. Rev. 96 (1923).
48 Karl N. Llewellyn, The Common Law Tradition: Deciding Appeals 5-7 (1960);
see also William Twining, Karl Llewellyn and the Realist Movement 203-69 (1973).
49 As Brian Leiter correctly notes, the largely empirical concern of the Legal Rea
ists that formally constraining legal norms may not be constraining in practice has
been unfortunately slighted by a modern preoccupation with redefining the Realists
as mostly concerned with baselines, the public-private distinction, and the contin-
gency of legal rules and legal concepts. Brian Leiter, Legal Realism and Legal Positiv-
ism Reconsidered, 111 Ethics 278, 280 n.8 (2001). As a historical matter, Robert Hale
and the other Realists who are associated with such ideas were not at the time taken
to be central figures. See Barbara H. Fried, The Progressive Assault on Laissez Faire:
Robert Hale and the First Law and Economics Movement (1998). As a nonhistorical

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2004] The Limited Domain of the Law 1925

Much the same focus can be seen in some strands of the Critical
Legal Studies Movement, especially those that self-consciously
seek to carry forward the Realist tradition.50 And here the Critical
Legal Studies perspective is usefully understood not as the often
caricatured claim that "law is politics," but rather as the broader
but nevertheless more plausible claim that "law is almost every-
thing."'51 Duncan Kennedy's hypothetical judge may have seen him-
self as having had a mission of social change,52 but a charitable
reading of Kennedy would suggest that he recognizes that not all
judges and not all legal decisionmakers have the same mission.
Rather, they typically have goals-vocations, to put it more
grandly-that are describable independently of legal norms, that
are more salient for them than legal norms, and that are more
important to them than the enforcement of legal norms qua legal
norms. Consequently, the argument goes, judges and other legal
decisionmakers often successfully use their antecedent (to law)
goals to shape decisions, proceeding then to employ malleable law
in the service of a largely unlimited and certainly nonpedigreeable
set of antecedent values that inform these goals. Accordingly,
judges are substantially less constrained by legal norms than the
typical picture of legal decisionmaking would suggest, and substan-
tially more focused on the larger domain of social and personal
goals than that traditional picture would suggest as well.
The Realist challenge to a limited domain conception of legal
decisionmaking has been carried forward not only in parts of Criti-
cal Legal Studies, but also, and in the spirit of the scientific side of
Realism, by those empirical political scientists subscribing to what

matter, the possibility that the formal or linguistic indications of legal rules may not
be the best predictor of legal outcomes is so central to understanding how law works
that the contemporary redefinition of Realism has urged a useful modern point at the
expense of slighting an even more useful traditional one.
? See Mark Tushnet, Critical Legal Studies: An Introduction to its Origins and Un-
derpinnings, 36 J. Legal Educ. 505, 507-10 (1986).
"' See Roberto Mangabeira Unger, The Critical Legal Studies Movement 1 (1986)
(contrasting formalism with "open-ended disputes about the basic terms of social life"
and suggesting that the contrast between formalist legal analysis and such open-ended
disputes is largely a function of the presence or absence of a "closely guarded
canon").
52 Duncan Kennedy, Freedom and Constraint in Adjudication: A Critical Phenome-
nology, 36 J. Legal Educ. 518, 521 (1986).

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 1926 Virginia Law Review [Vol. 90:1909

they call the "attitudinal" model of judicial behavior.53 In looking

to explain judicial outcomes-typically Supreme Court decisions
on constitutional issues-these social scientists have concluded that
the best predictor of such outcomes is not anything usefully called
"the law," but rather the array of prelegal "attitudes" held by the
Justices, with the determinants of those attitudes being a much lar-
ger collection of factors than can be found in law books, law
schools, and the general acculturation of lawyers and judges. Al-
though the set of determinants of judicial attitudes may not be infi-
nite, so the argument goes, it is a far wider set of factors and values
than a limited domain account of legal norms would suggest.
The range of factors ideally informing legal decisionmaking be-
comes yet wider in the views of self-described legal pragmatists, of
whom Richard Posner is the most prominent but hardly the only
example.54 For this group, the pragmatist vision is one whose focus
encompasses everything relevant to making the best all-things-
considered decision. If modern legal pragmatism has an enemy, it
is formalism, and the pragmatist pushes constantly against the idea
that the best decisions, all things considered, should yield to the
narrow limits of formal law.55 Similarly focused, but in less robust
form, are aspects of the Legal Process School, for again we see the

"See, e.g., Saul Brenner and Harold Spaeth, Stare Indecisis: The Alteration o
Precedent on the Supreme Court, 1946-1992, at 59-72 (1995); Glendon Schubert, The
Judicial Mind: The Attitudes and Ideologies of Supreme Court Justices, 1946-1963
(1965); Jeffrey A. Segal and Harold Spaeth, The Supreme Court and the Attitudinal
Model Revisited (2002); The Pioneers of Judicial Behavior 53-192 (Nancy Maveety
ed., 2003): Lee Epstein & Carol Mershon, Measuring Political Preferences, 40 Am. J.
Pol. Sci. 261 (1996); Jeffrey A. Segal & Albert D. Cover, Ideological Values and the
Votes of U.S. Supreme Court Justices, 83 Am. Pol. Sci. Rev. 557 (1989).
14 For Posner's conception of legal pragmatism, see Richard A. Posner, Law, Prag-
matism, and Democracy (2003); Richard A. Posner, Overcoming Law (1995); Richard
A. Posner, The Problematics of Moral and Legal Theory (1999); Richard A. Posner,
The Problems of Jurisprudence (1990); Richard A. Posner, Pragmatic Adjudication,
18 Cardozo L. Rev. 1 (1996); Richard A. Posner, What Has Pragmatism to Offer
Law?, 63 S. Cal. L. Rev. 1653 (1990). For critiques of Posner's pragmatism, see Daniel
A. Farber, Shocking the Conscience: Pragmatism, Moral Reasoning, and the Judici-
ary, 16 Const. Comment. 675 (1999) (book review); Michael Sullivan & Daniel J. So-
love, Can Pragmatism Be Radical? Richard Posner and Legal Pragmatism, 113 Yale
L.J. 687 (2003) (book review).
""'Formalism," when serving as something more than a term of all-purpose juris-
prudential abuse, is also a contested idea, but my own account of formalism is not in-
consistent with the limited domain account of law I explore here. See Frederick
Schauer, Formalism, 97 Yale L.J. 509 (1988).

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2004] The Limited Domain of the Law 1927

stress on making "reasonable" decisions-reasonable in light not

just of the law, but of a larger domain of values, policies, and stra-
tegic considerations.56 We can add to the list those who promote
all-things-considered balancing tests in constitutional law,57 and
even Lon Fuller, whose concentration on purpose in judicial deci-
sionmaking was presented as an opposition to what he saw as
H.L.A. Hart's too-narrow concern with the language of a legal
rule.58
I do not want to be excessively reductionist. There are important
differences among Dworkin, Eisenberg, Calabresi, Fuller, the Le-
gal Realists, the Critical Legal Studies Movement, the attitudinal
political scientists, the legal pragmatists, the balancers, and the Le-
gal Process School. Yet for all of their differences, these diverse
perspectives hold in common a rejection of the basic premise of
law as a significantly limited domain, and they thus share a rejec-
tion of the idea that what is important about law can be captured
by a rule of recognition substantially distinguishing the domain of
legal facts, norms, and sources from the domain of nonlegal facts,
norms, and sources. To these assembled theorists, schools, and per-
spectives, and thus to much of the pragmatic and instrumentalist
core of twentieth-century American legal thought,59 legal cognition
is largely unbounded, and so the basic motivation behind the con-
cept of the rule of recognition turns out to be empirically false. As
descriptive sociology, the inhabitants of this tradition might say,
the idea of a rule of recognition is flawed, depicting poorly the ex-

56 Henry M. Hart, Jr. & Albert M. Sacks, The Legal Process: Basic Problems in the
Making and Application of Law (William N. Eskridge, Jr. & Philip P. Frickey eds.,
1994).
" For broader discussions of constitutional balancing, see T. Alexander Aleinikoff,
Constitutional Law in the Age of Balancing, 96 Yale L.J. 943 (1987); Louis Henkin,
Infallibility Under the Law: Constitutional Balancing, 78 Colum. L. Rev. 1022 (1978);
Kathleen M. Sullivan, Foreword: The Justices of Rules and Standards, 106 Harv. L.
Rev. 24 (1992).
58 Lon L. Fuller, The Morality of Law 228-29 (Yale Univ. Press, rev. ed. 1969); Lon
L. Fuller, Positivism and Fidelity to Law-A Reply to Professor Hart, 71Harv. L.
Rev. 630 (1958).
59 For more on "pragmatic instrumentalist," see Robert S. Summers, Pragmatic In-
strumentalism in Twentieth Century American Legal Thought-A Synthesis and Cri-
tique of Our Dominant General Theory About Law and Its Use, 66 Cornell L. Rev.
861 (1981); Robert S. Summers, Professor Fuller's Jurisprudence and America's
Dominant Philosophy of Law, 92 Harv. L. Rev. 433 (1978).

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 1928 Virginia Law Review [Vol. 90:1909

perience of judging and even more poorly the practice of lawyer-

ing. From this perspective, it is not that Hart was deficient as a phi-
losopher or lawyer, but rather that he was deficient as a sociologist,
identifying in the rule of recognition a concept the point of which
neither explains legal practice nor captures in a useful way the pro-
fessional behavior of lawyers and judges.60

V. LIMITED DOMAINS AND THE DIFFERENTIATION OF LAW

The question of law as a limited domain is hardly the only im-

portant aspect of thinking about the nature of law. Still, much of
the stuff of law-resolving disputes, regulating behavior, making
policy, negotiating social conflict on important moral issues, and
much else-is not unique to the legal system. Consequently, exam-
ining the possibility that law may be a limited decisional domain
can illuminate both significant parts of the phenomenon of law and
the role of law and the legal system in a large and complex society.
In part, legal systems are important because, as a matter of institu-
tional design, they present themselves as contingent and not inevi-
table. Should human rights be protected by courts, legislatures, in-
vestigative commissions, or armies? Should tobacco policy be
settled by tort litigation, Food and Drug Administration regula-
tion, or congressional statute? Should contested electoral votes in a
presidential election be determined by courts, election commis-
sioners, or a legislature? Are issues of school finance, prison condi-
tions, affirmative action, welfare policy, and gun control better de-
termined in environments staffed largely by lawyers, or instead by
bodies expert in the particular subject matter, or perhaps by the
people's elected representatives? So with respect to Henningsen,
for example, does it make a difference whether New Jersey's Su-
preme Court or its legislature sets the conditions for unenforceabil-
ity of arguably unconscionable contracts? And turning to Riggs,
should the circumstances under which criminal acts bar beneficiar-

60 For an interesting attempt to meld serious empirical inquiry with traditional legal
positivism, see Brian Z. Tamanaha, Realistic Socio-Legal Theory: Pragmatism and a
Social Theory of Law (1997); Brian Z. Tamanaha, An Analytical Map of Social Scien-
tific Approaches to the Concept of Law, 15 Oxford J. Legal Stud. 501 (1995); Brian Z.
Tamanaha, Socio-legal Positivism and a General Jurisprudence, 21 Oxford J. Legal
Stud. 1 (2001).

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2004] The Limited Domain of the Law 1929

ies from claiming under wills in which they are named be worked
out over time in common law fashion, or is the issue better dealt
with comprehensively by legislative modification of the Statute of
Wills on the basis of recommendations by a panel of experts? In
these and countless other cases, law stands not as inevitable but as
an option, and the mechanism of lawyer argument and judicial
resolution compete with other social decisionmaking institutions to
be the locus of decision. And in these questions of institutional de-
sign and allocation of decisional authority, few issues are more im-
portant than the difference (if any) it makes to channel decisions
into law rather than elsewhere, and thus the question whether law
is a significantly limited domain becomes most pressing. If choos-
ing law means excluding many potential inputs to the best all-
things-considered decision, the choice is a crucial one. The ques-
tion of law as a limited domain thus places on center stage the issue
of what we lose (and what we gain) when we choose law. And even
if the task is not institutional design but simple understanding, the
distinction (or not) between law and other institutions in a complex
society undergirds most attempts to explain the phenomenon of
law and the character of a legal system.
Accordingly, then, exploring the possibility that law is a limited
domain requires addressing the "compared to what" issue. The
limited domain hypothesis has bite only when contrasted to a less
limited, even if not unlimited, domain, and so we must grasp the
idea of an "all-things-considered" judgment. Associated primarily
with (but not necessarily located solely within) consequentialism,
and in particular act-consequentialism,61 an all-things-considered
judgment screens out no fact or relationship that might bear on the
decision, and is thus open to any input causally related to the con-
sequences to whose maximization the consequentialist decision is
directed. And even outside a consequentialist framework, an all-

61 I follow conventional philosophical usage in taking utililitarianism to be a spec

case of consequentialism. Most of the literature on consequentialist decisionmaking
procedures, however, takes place within utilitarianism, and includes the various works
collected in Contemporary Utilitarianism (Michael D. Bayles ed., 1968). For more re-
cent work, see Brad Hooker, Ideal Code, Real World: A Rule-consequentialist The-
ory of Morality (2000); Conrad D. Johnson, Moral Legislation: A Legal-Political
Model for Indirect Consequentialist Reasoning (1991).

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 1930 Virginia Law Review [Vol. 90:1909

things-considered decision is open to any decisional input bearing

on whatever goal the process seeks to serve.
Not all political or policy decisions are all-things-considered de-
cisions, but many are substantially so. A good policy analysis is
marked by its ability to fathom the full range of policy-relevant
considerations. Similarly, we often understand political decisions to
be, at their best, unconstrained. It is misleading to think of systems
of parliamentary sovereignty-the understanding until the recent
entrenchment of various forms of quasi-constitutional human
rights legislation62-as totally without constitutional constraint, yet
legislative decisions in the United Kingdom, New Zealand, and Is-
rael were for much of their history largely devoid of second-order
constraints on first-order policy/political decisions. Little was
screened out in advance, and virtually every factor was potentially
relevant to every decision. In Joseph Raz's terminology, few exclu-
sionary reasons barred consideration of what might otherwise have
been germane to the best all-things-considered decision on any is-
sue. 63
With all-things-considered decisionmaking as the baseline, the
limited domain hypothesis posits that an appreciably large number
of considerations that might be available in all-things-considered
decisional domains are unavailable to law.' Yet although the idea

62 See Douglas W. Vick, The Human Rights Act and the British Constitution, 3
Tex. Int'l L.J. 329 (2002) (describing the incorporation of substantive provisions of the
European Convention on Human Rights into the domestic law of the United King-
dom).
63Joseph Raz, Practical Reason and Norms (1990). For in-depth discussion of exclu-
sionary reasons and their place in law, see Joseph Raz, The Authority of Law: Essays
on Law and Morality (1979) [hereinafter Raz, The Authority of Law]; Joseph Raz,
The Concept of a Legal System: An Introduction to the Theory of Legal System
(1970) [hereinafter Raz, The Concept of a Legal System]; see also Larry Alexander,
Law and Exclusionary Reasons, 18 Phil. Topics 5 (1990); Tim Dare, Raz, Exclusion-
ary Reasons, and Legal Positivism, 8 Eidos 11 (1989); Chaim Gans, Mandatory Rules
and Exclusionary Reasons, 15 Philosophia 373 (1986).
64 See Gerald Postema, Law's Autonomy and Public Practical Reason, in The
Autonomy of Law: Essays on Legal Positivism 79 (Robert P. George ed., 1996); Jo-
seph Raz, Legal Principles and the Limits of Law, 81 Yale L.J. 823 (1972); Frederick
Schauer, Rules and the Rule of Law, 14 Harv. J.L. & Pub. Pol'y 645 (1991). Postema
credits me with introducing the term "limited domain" to this conception of law. See
Postema, supra, at 113 n.9 (citing Schauer, supra, at 645). It has, however, had occa-
sional earlier appearances in just this sense among Critical Legal Studies and feminist
theorists who noted the claim of law as a limited domain for the purpose of ridiculing

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2004] The Limited Domain of the Law 1931

is clear, we need to explore just how a legal system could be such a

limited domain. Following the focus on sources of law in many of
the debates in modern legal theory, we start by hypothesizing a
limited domain of sources. When such a limited domain exists, the
sources of law are limited to those pedigreed by a rule of recogni-
tion. Otherwise acceptable sources of decisional guidance, not be-
ing recognized by the legal rule of recognition, do not count as law,
even though they might count as something else. Now it is true, as
some of the commentary on Dworkin has stressed,65 that the do-
main of law being limited is not a logical corollary of the idea of a
rule of recognition. In theory, a Hartian rule of recognition could
recognize as legal sources the full array of socially available
sources, and the domain of legal sources would be extensionally
equivalent to the domain of social sources.66 Yet although such a
set of congruent domains could satisfy the idea of a rule of recogni-
tion, the bite of the idea comes from the possibility that real rules
of legal recognition recognize a relatively narrow subset of what
the society in which those legal rules of recognition exist recog-
nizes.67 Were a legal rule of recognition to recognize all or almost
all social sources as valid sources of law, much (but not all) that we
think distinctive about law would disappear, and the idea of a rule
of recognition would do little to illuminate the phenomenon of law
and the institutions of a legal system.
Although the idea of a rule of recognition draws its explanatory
power from the possibility that not all that is recognized by society
is recognized by the legal system, I emphasize again my expanded
idea of a rule of recognition encompassing facts as well as norms. It
is true that a fact is deemed relevant (or not) by virtue of a norm.
Yet an excess focus on norms to the exclusion of facts may blind us
to the way in which an important task of a rule of recognition is to
determine which hard empirical facts are legally relevant and

it. See, e.g., Kathryn Abrams, The Deluge: A Trial and Judgment in One Act, 65 Tex.
L. Rev. 661, 687 (1987) (book review).
65 See Coleman, The Practice of Principle, supra note 24; W.J. Waluchow, Inclusive
Legal Positivism (1994); David Lyons, Principles, Positivism, and Legal Theory, 87
Yale L.J. 415 (1977); E. Philip Soper, Legal Theory and the Obligation of a Judge:
The Hart/Dworkin Dispute, 75 Mich. L. Rev. 473 (1977).
66 Coleman, Negative and Positive Positivism, supra note 24, at 139-40.
67 See John Gardner, Concerning Permissive Sources and Gaps, 8 Oxford J. Le
Stud. 457, 460 (1988) (referring to a "finite number of permissive standards").

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 1932 Virginia Law Review [Vol. 90:1909

which are not. Thus, it is better to think of legal as contrasted with

social materials, or legal as opposed to social data, or simply to un-
derstand the idea of a legal source capaciously, with the domain of
legal sources recognized by the legal rule of recognition being un-
derstood to encompass the full array of decisional inputs.
Although I focus on law as a limited domain, the differentiation
of legal from other decisional domains need not be based on the
domain of legal sources being limited. The domain of legal sources
might be coextensive with the domain of social sources, for exam-
ple, but the legal system could still use those sources differently.68
The legal system might, for example, and largely does, insist sub-
stantially on winner-take-all two-party decisionmaking, channeling
all disputes and policy decisions into decisionmaking mechanisms
in which splitting the difference is difficult, in which allowing one
party to win because she lost the last time is frowned upon, in
which continuous monitoring is awkward, and in which dealing
with a number of interests greater than two has emerged only with
difficulty by virtue of jury-rigged mechanisms for multiparty litiga-
tion being tacked on to a structure fundamentally designed for
two-party controversies. Thus, we might imagine a system charac-
terized by procedural differentiation, in which law is differentiated
from other decisionmaking venues not by the sources it uses but by
how it uses them. Because applying different procedures to the
same inputs would produce different results for some decisions-
insofar as the array of results produced by the same sources with
one procedure would be noncongruent with the array produced by
another procedure-legal procedures would make a difference
even if legal sources were not different at all.69
Even controlling for procedures as well as sources, different
forms of psychological, political, or cultural selection or accultura-
tion might still differentiate the legal system. Perhaps the array of
legal decisionmakers is selected (or self-selected) with a dispropor-

68 This is an important theme in Dennis Patterson, Normativity and Objectivity

Law, 43 Wm. & Mary L. Rev. 325 (2001).
69Thus, J.M. Balkin and Sanford Levinson argue for what they call "deep canonic-
ity," the idea that there may be "characteristic forms of legal argument, characteristic
approaches to problems, underlying narrative structures, unconscious forms of cate-
gorization, and the use of canonical examples" that differentiate law more than does
the "choice of materials." J.M. Balkin & Sanford Levinson, Legal Canons: An Intro-
duction, in Legal Canons 3, 5 (J.M. Balkin & Sanford Levinson eds., 2000).

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2004] The Limited Domain of the Law 1933

tionate focus on the dull (or the interesting), the cautious (or the
bold), the pessimistic (or the optimistic), the liberal (or the conser-
vative), and so on. And even assuming representative selection, le-
gal education and the social environment of law and lawyers might
reinforce some traits of personality and discourage others. If this
were the case (and numerous other variables could be added), we
might see something usefully differentiated as the legal system
even if both the sources and the procedures remained constant
across different decisional domains. Yet with this large disclaimer,
I still focus on a differentiation of sources and not on a differentia-
tion of procedures, personnel, or acculturation.70 My question is
whether we might usefully understand an important question about
law as the question of limited domain, and whether we might use-
fully examine whether law is the kind of limited domain of sources
I hypothesized above.

VI. TESTING THE LIMITED DOMAIN HYPOTHESIS-THE NATURE

OF JURISPRUDENTIAL INQUIRY REVISITED

At this point the inquiry appears to take an empirical turn. We

can grasp the idea of a rule of recognition, a set of such rules, or,
even better, a set of practices,7" without rolling up our sleeves and

7" On these differences, see Frederick Schauer & Virginia J. Wise, Legal Positivism
as Legal Information, 82 Cornell L. Rev. 1080 (1997).
7' Hart has given us the term "rule of recognition," but in doing so he may have mis-
characterized even his own insights. It is true that there could in theory be a rule of
recognition that was recognizable as a rule, and it is equally true that some of the
nonultimate rules of recognition in any legal system appear to be quite rule-like. Part
of what is interesting about the civil law, for example, is captured by the way in which
appearance in a formal code is sufficient and, in some systems, necessary for a norm
to count as a legal norm. And in using the word "rule," Hart seems to have imagined
rules of recognition of this sort, as in "In England they recognize as law ... whatever
the Queen in Parliament enacts .... Hart, supra note 1, at 102. Hart also recognizes
that a rule of recognition may fail to be expressly formulated and may even be un-
stated. Id. at 101. Yet in an important but underappreciated insight, Brian Simpson
has urged us to think of recognition not in terms of rules but of largely nonrule-like
Wittgensteinian practices. A.W.B. Simpson, The Common Law and Legal Theory, in
Legal Theory and Common Law 8 (William Twining ed., 1986); see, more recently,
Benjamin Zipursky, The Model of Social Facts, in Hart's Postscript: Essays on the
Postscript to The Concept of Law 219, 228-29 (Jules Coleman ed., 2001). Although
some hold that recognizing the nonruleness of the rule of recognition is quite damag-
ing to Hart, as does Matthew Kramer in The Rule of Misrecognition in the Hart of
Jurisprudence, 8 Oxford J. Legal Stud. 401, 406-11 (1988), to me the idea of recogni-

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 1934 Virginia Law Review [Vol. 90:1909

doing difficult empirical work. We can also understand the idea of

a limited domain without pursuing sociological inquiry. Neverthe-
less, taking the next step-attempting to determine whether a par-
ticular legal system or family of legal systems is or is not a limited
domain-is an unavoidably empirical inquiry. And although this
need not be thought problematic, much of jurisprudence, especially
philosophical analytic jurisprudence, has often been plagued by the
"if you have a hammer every problem looks like a nail" phenome-
non.72 When jurisprudence is defined as a philosophical enterprise,
and further defined as the asking of philosophical questions to
which only philosophical answers may be given, then we can un-
derstand the temptation to block off empirical exits from a phi-
losophically cabined jurisprudential enterprise.73 But if we follow
the inquiry where it goes, an inquiry that starts as philosophical
may head in an empirical direction,74 and when that is the case,
wisdom counsels against allowing disciplinary borders to impede
otherwise fruitful avenues of inquiry.75

tion safely survives its nonsusceptibility to rule-like formulation. Consider, for exam-
ple, the way in which citation of secondary works by living authors moved from being
unacceptable in English appellate practice to being sort of acceptable, with neither a
dramatic shift in rule, nor even less dramatic changes describable in rule-like terms.
What Hart called the "rule of recognition" is thus best seen as a collection of "prac-
tices of recognition," the latter term coming closer to capturing the amorphous and
shifting nature of what is an acceptable legal source as well as the way in which much
of the development over time takes place from the bottom up rather than from the
top down.
2 See Roger Cotterrell, The Politics of Jurisprudence: A Critical Introduction to
Legal Philosophy (2d ed. 2003).
7I do not deny that various disciplines might usefully want to retain their own com-
parative advantage in the best sense of that term, and in the desirable service of an
intellectual division of labor. That is how, for example, I understand the statement
that "[w]hether or not moral criteria of legality are capable of functioning as part of
an actual legal system in this or that society is really not a question of any philosophi-
cal interest (though of course it is of considerable sociological interest)." Jules L.
Coleman, Constraints on the Criteria of Legality, 6 Legal Theory 171, 182 (2000). The
danger is that desirable divisions of responsibility within jurisprudence will too easily
become definitions of jurisprudence.
74 On the empirical dimension (or not) of traditional legal "science," see Dennis Pat-
terson, Langdell's Legacy, 90 Nw. U. L. Rev. 196 (1995).
75 On these and related issues about the very methodology of jurisprudence, see
Julie Dickson, Evaluation and Legal Theory (2001); see also John Finnis, Natural Law
and Natural Rights 3-18 (1980); Leiter, Beyond the Hart/Dworkin Debate, supra note
11; Joseph Raz, On the Nature of Law, 82 Archiv fur Rechts- und Sozialphilosophie 1
(1996).

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2004] The Limited Domain of the Law 1935

If we avoid this pitfall, we must evaluate more systematically just

how limited, if at all, law's domain really is. Dworkin takes Riggs
and Henningsen to establish the nonlimited domain of legal deci-
sions, but are such cases representative? Perhaps in the ordinary
run of cases neither lawyers in their arguments nor judges in their
decisions even contemplate the possibility of venturing outside the
limited domain of pedigreed legal rules. Perhaps the phenomenol-
ogy of lawyering and judging is such that the mind focuses on a
small array of pedigreed legal materials, venturing beyond that lim-
ited array only in the truly exceptional case. Thus, even if judges
are socially empowered to depart from law's limited domain in
cases of grave injustice, and even if lawyers are similarly permitted
to urge them to do so, it may still be that in a large number of cases
involving some but not grave injustice, or unwise but not catastro-
phic policy implications, the "crowding out" effect of law's limited
domain renders ordinary injustice and routine policy error invisi-
ble. If this is actually so, then the fact that outcomes generated by
the law qua law are in theory subject to "not unjust" and "not un-
wise" filters may say little about the effect of such filters in routine
cases.76
In order to evaluate these and related possibilities, we would
need a systematic study of the actual inputs into legal argument
and legal decision.77 As a starting point, we could examine actual
sources used, perhaps believing that something of deep importance
about law was captured by the fact that, seemingly, well over
ninety-nine percent of all legal arguments are buttressed only, at
least explicitly, by that remarkably small set of norms contained in
books published by the West Publishing Company. Now there is a
response to this, which one we might associate with Llewellyn's de-

76 We could extend the filter metaphor by noting that filters can be fine or coarse
and the implicit claim in the text is that the filters applied to law-generated outcomes
are coarse and not fine, blocking large injustices or awful policy outcomes, but letting
many small injustices and suboptimal policy outcomes pass through unobstructed.
7 An illuminating discussion of the distinction between the ordinary business of the
law and the arguably exceptional cases that Dworkin and others employ is in Matthew
H. Kramer, Coming to Grips with the Law: In Defense of Positive Legal Positivism, 5
Legal Theory 171, 173-78 (1999). To similar effect is John Finnis, On Reason and Au-
thority in Law's Empire, 6 Law & Phil. 357, 360-76 (1987).

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1936 Virginia Law Review [Vol. 90:1909

construction of the canons of statutory

actually represents a larger Legal Realist claim. It might be, so the
argument would go, that virtually any nonlegal argument, norm,
value, or principle could in fact find some support in what looks
like a limited set of legal materials, and that finding most of the full
range of human normative thought in legal sources, at least in as
rich and dense a legal system as that of the United States, is not as
difficult as it seems. As a result, the argument goes, the task of
translating the unlimited domain of social sources into the limited
domain of legal sources is like translating French into English.
True, there are some things in French that do not translate easily
or completely into English-savoir faire, for example, or even the
Frenchman's silent shrug-but these are the exceptions and not the
rule, and we would dramatically misunderstand the richness of
English if we took such examples as demonstrating that English is
quite limited when compared to French. So too with law, and it
might well be that advanced and complex legal systems have de-
veloped in such a way that the set of norms and other inputs they
allow and encompass is so large as to render the limited domain
hypothesis somewhere between trivial and false. If uncontrover-
sially pedigreed legal sources turn out to contain the resources for
virtually all of the outcomes that would be reached in society at
large, then law is little more than a different language, and under-
standing it as a genuinely limited domain would be misleading.
This is not the place to pursue or even to sketch the full scope of
what a serious empirical test of the limited domain hypothesis
would look like. The few thoughts immediately above can best be
seen as a prolegomenon to a research program, and a woefully in-
complete prolegomenon at that. Still, these thoughts may serve to
underscore the essentially empirical nature of the claims that Hart
has implicitly made and that Dworkin has explicitly resisted, and
thus to suggest that their debate represents a serious framing of a
crucial dimension of trying to understand what, if anything, is
unique about the legal decisionmaking, and what characteristics
demarcate it from other decisionmaking institutions.

78 Karl N. Llewellyn, Remarks on the Theory of Appellate Decision and the Rules
or Canons About How Statutes Are to be Construed, 3 Vand. L. Rev. 395 (1950).

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2004] The Limited Domain of the Law 1937

Although I cannot here establish the truth of the proposition

that law is a significantly limited domain, there are, pace Dworkin,
reasonably strong indications that a limited domain picture of law
remains substantially accurate. The full history and breadth of
"murdering heir" cases, for example, suggests that Riggs represents
an exception to a then-prevailing and still-prevailing general rule
that even highly unworthy beneficiaries will inherit according to
the expressed terms of a will, not because allowing them to inherit
is the pragmatically or all-things-considered best decision, but sim-
ply because to most American lawyers and judges, before and after
Riggs, the unworthiness of the beneficiary-now, but not earlier,
stopping just short of first and second degree murder-is rendered
irrelevant by the Statute of Wills. We can find numerous examples
of courts allowing killers to take property that became available to
them solely because of their own culpable actions, including cases
involving a killer of the testator who was found not guilty by rea-
son of insanity,79 a killer of the testator who was convicted of volun-
tary manslaughter,80 murderers whose acts of murder caused prop-
erty to pass to their children although not directly to themselves," a
murderer convicted of being an accessory after the fact but not of
actually wielding the murder weapon,82 a murderer who did not kill
a "testator" but instead as remainderman killed the holder of the
life estate,83 and a "selfish, angry, resentful, indignant, bitter, sel
centered, spiteful, vindictive, paranoid, and stingy" individua
whose gross negligence served to "shorten the decedent's life" and
accelerate the perpetrator's inheritance.' In all of these cases, all
falling only slightly short of first and second degree murder, courts
have allowed culpable killers to inherit, and have treated the Riggs
v. Palmer principle, whether embodied in a statute or in the com-

Estate of Artz v. Artz, 487 A.2d 1294 (N.J. Super. Ct. App. Div. 1985).
80 Bird v. Plunkett, 95 A.2d 71 (Conn. 1953).
81 Prudential Ins. Co. of Am. v. Athmer, 178 F.3d 473 (7th Cir. 1999); In re Estate of
Van Der Veen, 935 P.2d 1042 (Kan. 1997).
82 Reynolds v. American-Amicable Life Ins. Co., 591 F.2d 343 (5th Cir. 1979
curiam).
83 Blanks v. Jiggetts, 64 S.E.2d 809 (Va. 1951).
84 Cheatle v. Cheatle, 662 A.2d 1362, 1364 (D.C. 1995); see also Schifanelli v.
lace, 315 A.2d 513 (D.C. 1974) (holding that a homicide judicially determined to be
the result of gross negligence does not bar the killer from recovering under the insur-
ance agreement).

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 1938 Virginia Law Review [Vol. 90:1909

mon law, as an exception to be construed narrowly, notwithstand-

ing the broad potential implications of the "no man may profit
from his own wrong" principle.
Much the same applies to Henningsen. Although Henningsen
was obviously influential in changing the law and was not just an
exception to the law, the case must still be evaluated as merely one
member of a larger set of legal events in which the strict terms of a
contract prevailed even under circumstances of considerable dis-
parity in bargaining power, and even when the weaker party's judi-
cially enforced waiver represented a considerable deprivation of
what would otherwise have been that party's common law legal
remedies.85 Henningsen notwithstanding, parties with little bargain-
ing power remain burdened, to their detriment, by a legal regime in
which courts routinely refuse to take unequal bargaining power
into account when they hold parties to what they have signed.
The potential unrepresentativeness of Riggs and Henningsen is
hardly limited to these two areas of legal doctrine. Federal judges
grudgingly enforce the literal language of the Federal Sentencing
Guidelines even when they believe those guidelines work an injus-
tice.86 Supreme Court Justices refrain from overturning even those

"There is an important theoretical disagreement at play here. Under one view, a

pedigreed set of legal rules might be said to have substantial weight even though the
results indicated by that set might on occasion be overcome by a very strong reason to
the contrary. This is the sense in which such rules might have presumptive force, and
under this view that force exists even when the presumption is overcome. See Freder-
ick Schauer, Playing By the Rules: A Philosophical Examination of Rule-Based Deci-
sion-Making in Law and in Life 196-206 (1991); Frederick Schauer, Can Rights Be
Abused?, 31 Phil. Q. 225 (1981); see also Stephen Perry, Judicial Obligation, Prece-
dent and the Common Law, 7 Oxford J. Legal Stud. 215 (1987); W.J. Waluchow, Au-
thority and the Practical Difference Thesis: A Defense of Inclusive Legal Positivism, 6
Legal Theory 45 (2000). Under the opposite view, however, rules that do not carry the
day, and especially rules that are rejected or (in the case of precedents) overruled,
cannot be said to be or to have been authoritative. See Tim Dare, Wilfred Waluchow
and the Argument from Authority, 17 Oxford J. Legal Stud. 347 (1997); Brian Leiter,
Realism, Hard Positivism, and Conceptual Analysis, 4 Legal Theory 533 (1998). This
is an important dispute with many implications throughout legal theory, and I note it
here only to suggest that taking one side or another in this dispute would be impor-
tant to determining the actual effect on the full domain of legal practice of a limited
set of rule-of-recognition-recognized legal norms.
86 See, e.g., United States v. Bristow, 110 F.3d 754, 757-59 (11th Cir. 1997) (regard-
ing the innocent possession of unloaded weapon); United States v. Lam, 20 F.3d 999,
1005 (9th Cir. 1994) (regarding the possession of shotgun whose shortened barrel
qualified it as a "sawed off" shotgun even though defendant was using it only to pro-

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2004] The Limited Domain of the Law 1939

precedents they believe to be morally or constitutionally flawed,87

and they follow the plain meaning of poorly drafted federal stat-
utes whose drafting deficiencies produce injustice or bad policy.88
And with some frequency courts refuse to make what to them ap-
pear to be wise all-things-considered changes in common or statu-
tory law, believing that such changes are for a legislature and not
for a legal system. So when the Supreme Court of New Hampshire
in In re Blanchflower refused to recognize extra-marital gay and
lesbian sexual activity as "adultery" for purposes of the New
Hampshire fault-based divorce law, it did so not because it thought
that limiting adultery to heterosexual activity had a sound basis in
policy or morality, but because it understood its own legal role in
far narrower terms.89
Indeed, the strongest example of this legal self-understanding-
the legal point of view-comes from those parts of the law in
which, by operation of a broadly worded statute, courts are explic-
itly authorized to operate in an unlimited fashion, but in which
they have nevertheless proceeded to convert that broad mandate
into something both narrower and more limited. When Congress in
the Sherman Act in effect told the courts to use whatever resources
were available to them to determine what was to count as a "con-
tract, combination... or conspiracy, in restraint of trade or com-
merce,"90 the courts proceeded to bridle against this authorization
to operate in unlimited domain fashion, and proceeded to substi-
tute a series of per se rules substantially narrowing their own scope

tect his own previously robbed convenience store). At times this works in the other
way, with the law's limited domain of permissible considerations making reasons for
greater punishment unavailable, as when a court found itself unable to increase a de-
fendant's sentence on the basis of having obliterated the serial number on a weapon
because the weapon, a silencer-equipped handgun, was manufactured by the defen-
dant and thus had never contained a serial number in the first place. United States v.
Bakhtiari, 913 F.2d 1053, 1063 (2d Cir. 1990).
" See West Lynn Creamery, Inc. v. Healy, 512 U.S. 186, 213 (1994) (Scalia, J.,
concurring in the judgment); City of Akron v. Akron Ctr. for Reprod. Health, Inc.,
462 U.S. 416, 419-20 (1983).
88 United States v. Locke, 471 U.S. 84 (1985), excoriated in Richard A. Posner, Le-
gal Formalism, Legal Realism, and the Interpretation of Statutes and the Constitu-
tion, 37 Case W. Res. L. Rev. 179, 204 (1986), rehabilitated in Frederick Schauer, The
Practice and Problems of Plain Meaning: A Response to Aleinikoff and Shaw, 45
Vand. L. Rev. 715, 728-30 (1992).
89 834 A.2d 1010 (N.H. 2003).
9(0 15 U.S.C. ? 1 (2000).

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 1940 Virginia Law Review [Vol. 90:1909

of operation and their own relative unlimited discretion in individ-

ual cases.91 Much the same can be said about the tendency of the
courts to make far more concrete and rule-like the initially open-
ended Securities and Exchange Commission Rule lOb-5,92 and of
course the frequent substitution in constitutional law of three- and
four-part legalistic tests for the far more open-ended and thus not
domain-restricted constitutional text.93 In numerous areas of law,
therefore, it turns out that courts themselves see law as a limited
domain, even to the extent of creating such a domain when they
are plainly authorized to operate in a far broader fashion.
Even if the lessons of Riggs and Henningsen turn out to be far
narrower than Dworkin and others have suggested, and even if it is
thus misleading to suggest that these cases demonstrate the perva-
sive role of moral principles in legal argument and judicial deci-
sionmaking, perhaps Dworkin and others need only show one in-
stance. As Dworkin himself has suggested,94 and as Duncan
Kennedy had suggested earlier,95 as long as departure from the lim-
ited domain is possible (the judge doesn't get fired, or disbarred, or
even widely criticized) in one case, then in every case the possibility
looms, such that the full domain of considerations remains open in
every instance of law application.96 So as long as Riggs-style adjudi-

91 See United States v. Socony-Vacuum Oil Co., 310 U.S. 150 (1940) (price-fixing);
Times-Picayune Publ'g Co. v. United States, 345 U.S. 594 (1953) (tying arrange-
ments). On the phenomenon generally, see Frederick Schauer, The Convergence of
Rules and Standards, 2003 N.Z. L. Rev. 303.
92 17 C.F.R ? 240.10b-5 (2002); see Thomas Lee Hazen, The Law of Securities Regu-
lation 683-700 (2d ed. 1990).
93 See, e.g., Central Hudson Gas & Elec. Corp. v. Pub. Serv. Comm'n of N.Y., 447
U.S. 557 (1980) (four-part test for commercial speech); Lemon v. Kurtzman, 403 U.S.
602 (1971) (three-part test under the Establishment Clause). The very fact that such
tests have been often criticized for their mechanical aspect is strong evidence of their
narrowing tendencies. See Morton J. Horwitz, Foreword: The Constitution of
Change: Legal Fundamentality Without Fundamentalism, 107 Harv. L. Rev. 30
(1993); Robert F. Nagel, The Formulaic Constitution, 84 Mich. L. Rev. 165 (1985); cf.
Frederick Schauer, Opinions as Rules, 62 U. Chi. L. Rev. 1455 (1995).
94 Dworkin, Law's Empire, supra note 9, at 350-54.
9' Duncan Kennedy, Legal Formality, 2 J. Legal Stud. 351 (1973).
96 There is a similar suggestion by Raz that
[i]n common-law countries, courts can distinguish common-law rules, apply
doctrines of equity, and use other devices to ensure that the law as applied to
the case is not unjust. Therefore, in such countries all judicial decisions rely on
at least one additional premise-i.e., that there is nothing in the situation that

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2004] The Limited Domain of the Law 1941

cation is possible, for example, then not just in Riggs and not just in
cases in which Riggs-style outcomes are reached, but in every case
the moral issue is on the table. If Riggs is permissible in one case
out of a thousand, so the argument goes, then in every one of those
thousand cases the issue is before the court whether the law should
be set aside in the service of nonpedigreed moral principles, and
thus those nonpedigreed moral principles are in play in every case
and not just in one case out of a thousand.
Although moral principles may be logically available in every
case, what is logically available may still be psychologically and
phenomenologically remote, so that in the vast majority of cases
neither lawyers in their arguments nor judges in their decisions
even contemplate the possibility of venturing outside the limited
domain of pedigreed legal rules.97 Instead, the phenomenology of
lawyering and judging may be such that the mind focuses on a
quite small array of pedigreed legal materials, with the mind wan-
dering beyond this only in the truly exceptional case.
Nor is thinking and operating largely within the limited domain
of plainly pedigreed legal materials restricted to judges or to law-
yers arguing before them. Lawyers in their non-appellate practices
focus overwhelmingly on the language of statutes, appellate cases,
and authoritative legal treatises, and law students learn the law
from casebooks whose content-cases, overwhelmingly-differs
less than might have been expected were the lessons of the Realists
truly accepted. And when lawyers criticize legal outcomes, it is rare
for them to couch those criticisms in the language of morality or
policy. Rather, they accuse judges of having mistakenly interpreted
statutes, constitutional provisions, and reported cases, again under-
scoring the way in which the actual practices of judging, legal ar-

would justify modifying the law, or its application to the case, by this court on
this occasion.
Raz, supra note 21, at 4. For the argument that such an acknowledgment undermines
legal positivism, see Jeffrey D. Goldsworthy, The Self-Destruction of Legal Positiv-
ism, 10 Oxford J. Legal Stud. 449, 486 (1990).
97 "[T]he sense of a gap between legal argumentation and moral argumentation
not a theoretical specialty or insight demanding extraordinary mental concentration.
To the contrary, its presupposed existence is the common fare not just of the general
public but of working-stiff lawyers, including the ones who sit as judges." Frank I.
Michelman, Dilemmas of Belonging: Moral Truth, Human Rights, and Why We
Might Not Want a Representative Judiciary, 47 UCLA L. Rev. 1221, 1242 (2000).

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1942 Virginia Law Review [Vol. 90:1909

gument, and legal education remain disproportionately focused on

a limited domain of plainly pedigreed legal materials.
This is not to say that we could not also find numerous counter-
parts to Riggs and Henningsen, for of course we can. Moreover, re-
liance on policy and principle often looms large in legal arguments,
and discussions of policy and principle often loom even larger in
the classrooms of American law schools. Yet it is not implausible
to see the roles of policy and principle as playing a decidedly sec-
ondary and interstitial role in American legal practice, and as play-
ing an even smaller role if we look not only at hard cases but at the
full range of the ordinary business of the law. Policy and principle
appear before us when the law runs out, and also when the results
the law generates even when it has not run out seem extremely,
and not just somewhat, unwise as a matter of policy or extremely,
and not just a little bit, unjust as a matter of morality. In such cases
the presumptive dominance of the limited domain is overcome,
but, still as a testable hypothesis far more than a demonstration, it
appears likely that only significantly wide legal gaps, significantly
serious mistakes of policy, and significantly grave cases of injustice
are sufficient to allow the intrusion of such considerations into the
limited domain of rule-of-recognition-recognized legal materials.
When the gaps are narrow, or when what the law says in the areas
between its gaps falls well short of policy or moral catastrophe
even when it is somewhat unwise or somewhat unjust, the legal sys-
tems of even the countries in which the domain of law seems least
limited are ones in which the rule of recognition appears to do real
work, and in which failing to recognize the overwhelming narrow-
ness of legal argument produces a distorted picture of the practices
and institutions we know as the law.

VII. WHITHER POSITIVISM?

At some difficulty, but not without purpose, I have avoided al-

most any mention of the word "positivism." That is because what I
have suggested to this point might retain its potential interest and
importance even had the word "positivism" never been invented,
even had legal positivists never existed, and even had legal theo-
rists for the last half century, century, or two centuries not been
debating the nature of legal positivism and the soundness of posi-
tivism as one perspective on the nature of law. Accordingly, good

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 2004] The Limited Domain of the Law 1943

judgment would suggest I leave positivism out of my analysis of

law's domain, thereby avoiding the slings and arrows of legions of
legal positivists who would claim that in associating the limited
domain hypothesis with legal positivism I have misunderstood or
misinterpreted the positivist tradition. The theorist of good sense
who wanted to discuss the limited domain hypothesis would ignore
legal positivism entirely, leaving the positivists to different issues
and different debates.
Yet even apart from suffering from a deficiency of good sense, I
remain unwilling to cede important dimensions of a long and rich
positivist tradition to contemporary debates among positivists, de-
bates whose outcome may insufficiently advance our understand-
ing of the phenomenon of law. Thirty-five years ago Robert Sum-
mers, having identified twelve different positions that were often
labeled as "positivist," many of them mutually exclusive, urged that
the term be dropped entirely on the grounds that it had become
"radically ambiguous and dominantly pejorative."98 But such a
strategy runs the risk of ignoring too much that is important and
correct in the positivist tradition, and of neglecting the label that
serves to draw together important parts of that tradition. More-
over, an important part of the positivist program is the concern
with the autonomy of law, a concern that not implausibly grows out
of historical positivism's traditional focus on the actual (and not
only the conceptual) separation of law and morality.99 So although
the idea of law as a limited normative or decisional domain is not a
necessary condition for law's autonomy, it is certainly one of the
more obvious ways in which law could be thought of as at least
partly autonomous from the larger domain in which it exists. My
inquiry here is thus not so much an effort to reorient or to recap-
ture positivism as to emphasize a dimension of the positivist tradi-
tion that appears to have been shunted aside.

98 Robert S. Summers, Legal Philosophy Today-An Introduction, in Essays in Le-

gal Philosophy 1, 15-16 (Robert S. Summers ed., 1968); see also Kent Greenawalt,
Too Thin and Too Rich: Distinguishing Features of Legal Positivism, in The Auton-
omy of Law: Essays on Legal Positivism, supra note 64, at 1, 24 (arguing that, when
discussing positivism, "we may do better to discuss issues on their own, not relying so
much on labels that now mislead and irritate more than they clarify").
99 See The Autonomy of Law: Essays on Legal Positivism, supra note 64; see also
Brian Bix, Law as an Autonomous Discipline, in The Oxford Handbook of Legal
Studies 975 (Peter Cane & Mark Tushnet eds., 2003).

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 1944 Virginia Law Review [Vol. 90:1909

When Dworkin first objected to legal positivism, he challenged

what he understood to be Hart's commitment to a limited domain
account of law. In response to Dworkin, Hart's defenders-first
David Lyons and Philip Soper, then Neil MacCormick, and then
Jules Coleman and others-all sought, in different ways, to show
that the various aspects of Riggs, Henningsen, and the other exam-
ples that Dworkin claimed demonstrated the untenability of the
law/nonlaw distinction showed nothing of the kind, and that Riggs,
Henningsen, and the other horses in Dworkin's stable of examples
are in fact based entirely on law in a Hartian positivist sense."??
There is some truth in these objections, for formal pedigreed rule-
of-recognition-recognized law may be broader (especially in its in-
clusion of many of the things that Dworkin calls "principles") than
Dworkin's assault on positivism takes it to be. Yet some of these
objections went beyond the claim that law can include principles to
the claim that law can in theory include anything that a society
conventionally decides. In this line of argument, one sees a pro-
gressive broadening of the positivist picture of law in a way that
makes Dworkin wrong, but at the risk of losing the core insight of
the pre-Hartian and possibly even Hartian positivist idea. As Jer-
emy Waldron somewhat snidely but not completely inaccurately
describes the situation, "the motive behind such moves is to secure
a victory in the descriptive debate for a position called 'legal posi-
tivism', no matter what that position turns out to be.""10 More deli-
cately, Kent Greenawalt observes that framing the issue in this way

'e See Neil MacCormick, Legal Reasoning and Legal Theory (1978); Coleman, su-
pra note 73; Coleman, Markets, Morals and The Law, supra note 24; Coleman, Nega-
tive and Positive Positivism, supra note 24; Matthew H. Kramer, Throwing Light on
the Role of Moral Principles in the Law: Further Reflections, 8 Legal Theory 115
(2002); Lyons, supra note 65; Soper, supra note 65; Waluchow, supra note 65.
101 Jeremy Waldron, The Irrelevance of Moral Objectivity, in Natural Law Theory:
Contemporary Essays 158, 160 (Robert P. George ed., 1992). Even less gentle is
Dworkin, Thirty Years On, supra note 2, at 1656:
Exclusive positivism, at least in Raz's version, is Ptolemaic dogma: it deploys ar-
tificial conceptions of law and authority whose only point seems to be to keep
positivism alive at any cost. Inclusive positivism is worse: it is not positivism at
all, but only an attempt to keep the name 'positivism' for a conception of law
and legal practice that is entirely alien to positivism.
Dworkin's charge turns considerably more ad hominem later. See id. at 1678.

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2004] The Limited Domain of the Law 1945

"does not seem very important for understanding the legal systems
under which we live."1102
As developed in the ensuing several decades, the defense of
positivism against Dworkin has blossomed into a position variously
described as soft positivism,'03 inclusive positivism," and incorpor
tionism.105 With its sometimes forgotten roots in Kelsenj the posi-
tion, to oversimplify it, is that law (but not the concept of law) is
what a community says it is, and not what God or objective non-
conventional morality says it is. By existing as a function of social
choice and not extra-social force, law is thus "posited," and is not
usefully thought of as in any way "natural." But because commu-
nity determination of what law is provides both the necessary and
sufficient conditions for legality in that community, the inclusive
legal positivists insist, positivism is compatible with law being inter-

102 Greenawalt, supra note 98, at 14. For additional discussion of the consequences
of broadening positivism, see also David Dyzenhaus, Caveat Reviewer-A Reply to
Matthew Kramer, 21 Oxford J. Legal Stud. 703, 703-04 (2001); David Dyzenhaus,
Positivism's Stagnant Research Programme, 20 Oxford J. Legal Stud. 703, 715 (2000);
William Twining, Imagining Bentham: A Celebration, in Current Legal Problems
1998, at 1, 21 (M.D.A. Freeman ed., 1998) (stating that much of the current debate is
"repetitious, trivial, and almost entirely pointless").
10 This is the term used by Hart in his Postscript to describe the position and to ex-
press some highly qualified sympathy with it. Hart, supra note 1, at 250-54; see also
Eleni Mitrophanous, Soft Positivism, 17 Oxford J. Legal Stud. 621 (1997). As should
be apparent, I believe that Hart's even cautious and qualified sympathy with soft posi-
tivism is in some tension with the most important themes of The Concept of Law, and
in even greater tension with important parts of the pre-Concept of Law positivist tra-
dition.
14 Waluchow supra note 65; Brian Bix, Patrolling the Boundaries: Inclusive Legal
Positivism and the Nature of Jurisprudential Debate, 12 Can. J.L. & Jurisprudence 17
(1999); W.J. Waluchow, Herculean Positivism, 5 Oxford J. Legal Stud. 187 (1985);
Waluchow, supra note 85.
9'( The term comes from Jules Coleman, Jules L. Coleman, Incorporationism, Con
ventionality, and the Practical Difference Thesis, 4 Legal Theory 381 (1998), and la-
bels a position Coleman has developed over a considerable period of time. Coleman,
The Practice of Principle, supra note 24; Coleman, Negative and Positive Positivism,
supra note 24; see also Kenneth Eimar Himma, H.L.A. Hart and the Practical Differ-
ence Thesis, 6 Legal Theory 1 (2000); Kenneth Eimar Himma, Incorporationism and
the Objectivity of Moral Norms, 5 Legal Theory 415 (1999).
106 Kelsen's idea of the Grundnorm was as agnostic on the content of actual Grund-
normen as inclusive legal positivists maintain that the idea of a rule of recognition is
about the content of any particular rule of recognition, so it may be fair to attribute to
Kelsen's positivism the first development of the idea that law, as opposed to the con-
cept or pure theory of it, could be compatible with a wide variety of relationships be-
tween law and morality.

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 1946 Virginia Law Review [Vol. 90:1909

twined with morality, with (correct) morality being a criterion of

legality, and even with the domain of law being coincident with the
domain of morality or the domain of social norms. As long as this
is what the community specifies as its law, and as long as commu-
nity specification is not subject to further moral (or other) tests,
then we can understand law as being posited, we can understand
that legal validity does not necessarily depend on moral validity,
and we can understand the positivist picture of law as being cor-
rect. To the inclusive legal positivist, positivism is simply the claim
that the concept of law itself does not demand a moral test for legal
validity, and this claim, say the inclusive legal positivists, is consis-
tent with law being subject to moral tests of legal validity in some
legal systems, and even with law being contingently subject to
moral tests of legal validity in all extant legal systems.
There are many possible responses to inclusive legal positivism,
but the most powerful might be a challenge to its importance. So
let us assume that inclusive legal positivism is correct, and that the
concept of law encompasses all varieties of law that a community
may posit, including not only the variety in which legal validity is
not a function of morality, but also the varieties in which morality
is either a necessary or a sufficient condition for legal validity.'07
But if the concept of law includes, inter alia, a legal system in which
the set of legal norms is congruent with the set of social norms, a
legal system in which morality is a criterion (or even the sole crite-
rion) of legal validity, and a legal system in which morality is ir-
relevant to legal validity, then what does this conception of legal
positivism tell us about law? It does tell us that natural law is mis-
taken, and indeed the inclusive positivist position has been explic-
itly described by its proponents as chiefly an alternative to natural
law.108 Yet the only natural law position that inclusive legal positiv-
ism falsifies is the position that morality is a necessary condition for
legality, such that immoral laws are simply not laws at all-lex in-
justa est non lex. But although inclusive legal positivism does falsify

107 On the differences between morality as a necessary condition for legality and mo-
rality as a sufficient condition for morality, see, for example, Matthew Kramer, How
Moral Principles Can Enter into the Law, 6 Legal Theory 83 (2000).
1 See Coleman, Markets, Morals and the Law, supra note 24, at 4 ("Positivism de-
nies what natural law theory asserts, namely, a necessary connection between law and
morality.").

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2004] The Limited Domain of the Law 1947

this often caricatured version of natural law, a version that one can
actually discover in occasional quotes from Cicero109 and William
Blackstone,110 it does not tell us even that the more sophisticated
versions of natural law to be found in Thomas Aquinas1"' or John
Finnis112 are wrong. It may possibly tell us that Fuller's complex
procedural variation on natural law theory"13 is wrong as well, but
only a particularly uncharitable reading of Fuller that would put
the Ciceronian version of natural law at center stage. As a conse-
quence, inclusive legal positivism, even if correct, runs the risk of
failing to challenge or falsify any vision of the nature of law that
people have taken seriously for the past two hundred and fifty
years.114 "Law is whatever the people (or the judges) say it is" is an
important claim if there are serious arguments for moral criteria
for legal validity, but without those arguments, inclusive positivism
is largely battling a straw man.
Thus, apart from putting still one more nail in the coffin of a par-
ticularly indefensible version of natural law, it is difficult to see
what the correctness of inclusive legal positivism teaches us. With
most versions of natural law off the table, the proposition that law
is what a society says is trivially true. That societies can determine
what is to count as law, and can determine it within a range so wide
that it encompasses both the necessary (within that society) coinci-
dence of law and morality and the necessary (within that society)
exclusion of any reference to morality in the criteria for legal valid-
ity, tells us nothing about what this society or that society has actu-
ally determined. Proponents of inclusive positivism do take pains

109 Cicero, De Legibus, bk. I, ? 6 (C.W. Keyes trans., 1928).

1 1 William Blackstone, Commentaries *44.
... Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, questions 90, 91, 94, 95, 96 (R.J. Henle S.J
ed. & trans., University of Notre Dame Press 1993).
112 Finnis, supra note 75; John Finnis, The Truth in Legal Positivism, in The Auton-
omy of Law: Essays on Legal Positivism, supra note 64, at 195.
"_ Fuller, The Morality of Law, supra note 58; Fuller, Positivism and Fidelity to
Law, supra note 58.
114 There is a surprising prevalence in modern jurisprudential debate of the "no one
believes this anymore" substitute for argument, surprising because it is the kind of ar-
gument from mass opinion (or mass academic opinion) that we might expect philoso-
phers to try to avoid. The statement in the text is not intended to be a member of this
unfortunate genre, but only a worry about the extent to which a significant amount of
contemporary jurisprudential debate draws its impetus from opposing what may well
be more of a straw than a strong and widely held position.

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 1948 Virginia Law Review [Vol. 90:1909

to distinguish general from particular jurisprudence, with the lat-

ter being concerned with what law looks like in this or that society
but the former being concerned only with what is true about the
concept of law in all legal systems. We are then prompted, how-
ever, to reframe the previous tendentious question about the im-
portance of inclusive positivism and instead to pose a different ten-
dentious challenge about what questions general jurisprudence
asks or answers that illuminate the phenomenon of law. There may
be some, but it is surely not absurd to suggest that this is a legiti-
mate issue to raise, especially when the consequence is in effect to
banish what appears to be a traditionally important aspect of juris-
prudential inquiry.
In the current debates, inclusive legal positivism typically does
battle with, not surprisingly, exclusive legal positivism. And al-
though Dworkin has been as dismissive of the so-called exclusive
version of legal positivism as he has of the inclusive, exclusive legal
positivism, commonly associated today with Joseph Raz,116 and ably
amplified by Scott Shapiro,1"7 far more faithfully captures the tradi-
tional positivist concerns. By claiming that positivism is committed
to a strictly source-based view of law, Raz's view comes closer to
the spirit of the idea of a rule of recognition, to the historical posi-
tivist concern with the actual and not just conceptual separation of
law and morality, and to trying to explain the empirical and not just
conceptual autonomy of legal thought and legal argument."18 Yet in
developing this view, Raz rejects the view that any part of a legal
system in which morality is a criterion for legality can be under-
stood in legal positivist terms. This would seem to suggest that the
interpretation and application of the morally loaded provisions of,
for example, the Constitution of the United States, would not
count as law to Raz, and it would also suggest that whatever it was

... On the distinction, see Moore, supra note 18, at 302; see also, with different
terminology, the discussion in Brian Bix, Law, Language, and Legal Determinacy
190-95 (1993); Brian H. Bix, Raz on Necessity, 22 Law & Phil. 537, 546-54 (2003).
116 See Raz, The Authority of Law, supra note 63; Joseph Raz, Authority, Law, and
Morality, 68 Monist 295 (1985).
117 See Shapiro, The Difference That Rules Make, supra note 26; see also Leiter, su-
pra note 85, cautiously defending "hard positivism"-Leiter's label for exclusive posi-
tivism-and suggesting a relationship between the conceptual claims of hard positiv-
ism and empirical inquiry that is not incompatible with what I argue here.
118 That this was Raz's focus was apparent early on. See Raz, supra note 64.

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2004] The Limited Domain of the Law 1949

the judges were doing in Riggs, Heningsen, and many other com-
mon law cases, it was not law. In arriving at this point, Raz's debt
to Kelsen, especially apparent in Raz's earliest work, is most obvi-
ous. Just as Kelsen emphasized that no legal decision was com-
pletely determined by the law, so too can Raz accept that impor-
tant parts of American (and, now, South African, Canadian, and
British, among others) judicial and legal practice are not based on
what the positivist would call law.119 If one can accept that no legal
decision is completely determined by law, one can accept as well
that many legal decisions are largely undetermined by law, even
though they may determine what the law will be.120 For Raz and the
other exclusive positivists, there is a profound difference, to use
Raz's words, between law and legal reasoning, and it is the goal of
exclusive legal positivism to explain the former and be relatively
unconcerned with the latter. The latter, Raz insists, is unavoidably
moral in part, but that fact says nothing about the criteria for law in
strictu sensu.121
Raz's exclusive positivism is at the same time both useful and
unsatisfying. It is useful in putting a sharp analytic edge on Kel-
sen's point that law ought not simply to be equated with what law-
yers do, what judges do, or even with the output of legal institu-
tions.122 To say that law is what lawyers and judges do is too simple,

119 I will bracket here the potentially interesting possibility that declarations of un-
constitutionality are not equivalent to declarations of legal invalidity in the sense of
invalidity used by legal theorists. See Jules Coleman's report of Raz's view to this ef-
fect in Coleman, The Practice of Principle, supra note 24, at 110, and Dworkin's re-
joinder in Dworkin, Thirty Years On, supra note 2, at 1675. Thus, exclusive legal posi-
tivism may not be inconsistent with arguably indeterminate morally loaded phrases-
equal protection of the laws, cruel and unusual punishments, unreasonable searches
and seizures-being enforceable parts of the positive law, and parts whose function is
not to render other parts invalid, but only to make them unenforceable.
120 Thus, Raz takes pains to distinguish law from legal reasoning, and insists that le-
gal reasoning-much closer to what judges do-is not based solely on the law. Raz,
supra note 21, at 4-6.
121 See also Coleman, supra note 73, at 171 ("No one denies that moral principles
figure in legal argument and practice.").
122 See Joseph Raz, Legal Principles and the Limits of the Law, in Ronald Dworkin
and Contemporary Jurisprudence 73, 85 (Marshall Cohen ed., 1984). Raz argues that
the moral standards that judges may be legally required to follow (as, for example,
with moral standards like equality that are legally enshrined in the United States Con-
stitution) are still not, as moral standards, law. Id. On this point, see Bix, supra note
104, at 27-28.

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 1950 Virginia Law Review [Vol. 90:1909

for we need a way to differentiate the distinctively legal part of

such roles and activities from the parts that are shared with other
agents, other institutions, and other functions. Yet although Raz's
exclusive positivism illuminates this aspect of law, it may, for mod-
ern legal systems, explain too little of legal practice and too little of
the process by which conclusions are reached in legal argument
and judicial decision. If a large part of what lawyers and judges do
in advanced legal systems is not to count as having been based on
law,123 and if many of the most salient (and potentially distinctive)
aspects of a legal system do not involve what Raz and other exclu-
sive positivists would call "law," then we can again ask what di-
mensions of law are usefully illuminated by exclusive legal positiv-
ism.12' There may be some, and more may be illuminated by
exclusive than inclusive positivism, but if too much remains unil-
luminated we can understand why Dworkin and others would wish
to head in a different direction.
Yet although empirical inquiry is not Raz's project, such an em-
pirical inquiry, if guided by Raz's conception of exclusive positiv-
ism, may turn out to be more useful. If source-validated norms
dominate the practice of legal argument and judicial decision, and
if their place in such argument turns out to be a function of their
source and not of their content, then it may be that the positivist
picture of law, as understood by exclusive legal positivism, is
largely correct, and that source-based authority indeed lies at the
heart of the concept of law. To put it differently, and perhaps by
way of reviewing the bidding, it would not be unreasonable to take
this prolegomenon to an empirical inquiry as offering the tentative
conceptual conclusion that Dworkin was largely correct in his un-
derstanding of the claims of legal positivism he wished to attack.
Dworkin's contrast between positivism's "austerity" and a system
in which judges and legal officials "turn to more general principles
of strategy and fairness,"'125 for example, can without much strain be

123 Even though, Raz would say, exclusive legal positivism is compatible with judges
having a large role to play in determining what law will be, and even if in some sys-
tems judges may have a legal obligation to do so.
24 For another suggestion that what is interesting and important about law may be
captured neither by incorporationism nor by exclusive positivism, see Kramer, supra
note 107.
25 Dworkin, Thirty Years On, supra note 2, at 1677.

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2004] The Limited Domain of the Law 1951

seen as a different way of expressing the understanding of positiv-

ism as committed to, even if not quite coincident with, the idea of
law as a limited domain. But although I have argued that
Dworkin's characterization of positivism was largely correct, I have
argued as well, pending a more serious empirical testing of the lim-
ited domain hypothesis for the same system at the same time, that
Dworkin was likely mistaken in believing that his attack on his cor-
rectly conceived understanding of positivism was successful.
To the extent that, at least in this Part, I have attempted to con-
nect the idea of law as a limited domain to the best understanding
of legal positivism, it is partly in the service of the historical project
of attempting to prevent the loss of an important part of the posi-
tivist tradition. When Jeremy Bentham took pains to make clear
that laws could be cruel, impolitic, and perhaps even unconstitu-
tional but could not be illegal,126 he could not have had anything in
mind other than that the domain of the legal was to be demarcated
from the domains of the moral, the political, and the constitutional.
This becomes even more clear when we focus on Bentham's exco-
riation of the common law and his obsession with what Gerald
Postema calls "publicly accessible"127 law taking the form of rules
with "explicit, fixed, verbal formulationss]."18 Most importantly,
when Bentham made clear that he did not wish judges to engage in
a direct utilitarian approach to their adjudicatory tasks but rather
to follow the rules of law explicitly,129 he cannot be interpreted in
any way other than as believing that the domain of judicial deci-
sionmaking (and, presumably, lawyer advocacy) was to be substan-
tially limited when compared to the direct utilitarian calculations in
which he expected legislators and policy designers to engage.
John Austin's focus was similar. Like Bentham, Austin was con-
cerned-perhaps "obsessed" would be a better word-to offer a
"line of demarcation" between positive law and various other sorts
of rules and norms.130 Indeed, Austin was even more concerned

12 Jeremy Bentham, Of Laws in General ch. I, ? 8 (H.L.A. Hart ed., 1970).

127 Gerald J. Postema, Bentham and the Common Law Tradition, at ix (1986); s
also id. at 295 ("public standards"), 448 ("public knowledge").
128 Id. at 290.

29 Id. at 440-64; see also Gerald J. Postema, The Expositor, the Censor, and the
Common Law, 9 Can. J. Phil. 643 (1979).
130 John Austin, The Province of Jurisprudence Determined, Lecture I (William
Rumble ed., Cambridge University Press 1995) (1832); see Wilfred E. Rumble, Divine

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1952 Virginia Law Review [Vol. 90:1909

than Bentham with authority,131 and with the use of authority to

screen out from most of ordinary and much of legal decisionmak-
ing the kinds of considerations of utility that were appropriate for
an "intellectual elite.",132 Even Kelsen, whose project was far more
conceptual and less descriptive, empirical, and prescriptive than
Bentham's or Austin's, developed his "pure theory" in part be-
cause of the belief that "alien elements" like psychology, sociology,
ethics, and political theory were being too easily mixed with legal
science, and thus that actual and not just conceptual legal scientists
were refusing to recognize the actual limits of their own compe-
tence.133 Moreover, Kelsen believed that a "legal order" served cer-
tain important social purposes, and though he believed that a legal
order could be identified purely and non-normatively, he was not
agnostic on the desirability of such an order.134 Similarly, if we go
back to the earliest traces of positivism, we see that Hobbes, like
Bentham and Austin, thought it important in actual legal systems
to be able to identify the law from among a much larger domain of
social, moral, and political norms.'35
Bentham, Austin, Kelsen, and Hobbes are four of the most
prominent names in pre-Hartian positivism, and I select them non-
randomly out of a much larger tradition. But the focus of their pro-
jects makes clear that the demarcation of law from its neighbors is
one of the continuing concerns of the legal positivist tradition, a
concern that has its roots not only in conceptual analysis but in
recognition of the importance of trying to offer theoretical ac-
counts of genuine distinctions that Bentham, Austin, Kelsen,
Hobbes, and many others observed in the actual legal systems with
which they were most familiar. In an important respect, my efforts
to (re)connect the idea of law as a limited domain with legal posi-

Law, Utilitarian Ethics, and Positivist Jurisprudence: A Study of the Legal Philosophy
of John Austin, 23 Am. J. Jurisprudence 139 (1978).
131 See Postema, supra note 127, at 327.
132 Id.
133 Hans Kelsen, General Theory of Law and State 5-6 (Anders Wedberg trans.,
1945); Hans Kelsen, Pure Theory of Law 1 (Max Knight trans., 2d ed. 1967).
134 See Hans Kelsen, The Pure Theory of Law and Analytical Jurisprudence, 55
Harv. L. Rev. 44,49 (1941).
135 Dyzenhaus, supra note 102, at 708 (discussing chapter 26 of Thomas Hobbes' Le-
viathan (John Gaskin, ed., Oxford Univ. Press 1998) (1651)).

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2004] The Limited Domain of the Law 1953

tivism signal a concern to preserve an important dimension of the

descriptive positivist tradition.
Indeed, positivism's roots become even more important once we
recognize that, for Bentham and Hobbes, legal positivism had a
prescriptive function as well as a descriptive one. Bentham, for ex-
ample, was concerned not only with the demarcation of law from
larger and less easily applied utilitarian norms, but was also con-
cerned with urging a system in which the activities of judges were
restricted to the law. For Bentham, the domain of the law was not
only something to be identified and described, but was also the
domain within which judges were to be corralled. And although we
may agree or disagree with Bentham's prescriptive program, it
should be clear that only a limited domain conception of positivism
can support such a prescriptive agenda. Two hundred years on, we
still debate judicial power in the language of permissible and im-
permissible sources for judicial decision, and thus there is a fruitful
connection between Bentham's prescriptive agenda and contempo-
rary debates. Further, there remains now a significant group of
theorists who carry on a prescriptive positivist agenda in just those
136
terms.
Moreover, a different form of the prescriptive side of positivism
defends positivism as the best way of offering a strong critique of
law.137 Again, such a claim for positivism's virtue may or may not b
sound, but the existence of the position makes clear that a version
of positivism supporting such a critique is an important part of the
positivist tradition in ways not incompatible with Bentham's basic
ideas. To redefine positivism so that it is no longer capable of even
supporting a prescriptive claim thus seems unfaithful to positiv-

136 See Tom D. Campbell, The Legal Theory of Ethical Positivism (1996); Neil M
Cormick, Ethical Positivism and the Practical Force of Rules, in Judicial Power, De-
mocracy and Legal Positivism 37 (Tom Campbell & Jeffrey Goldsworthy eds., 2000);
Anthony J. Sebok, Misunderstanding Positivism, 93 Mich. L. Rev. 2054 (1995). For
discussion, see Deryck Beyleveld & Roger Brownsword, Normative Positivism: The
Mirage of the Middle Way, 9 Oxford J. Legal Stud. 463 (1989). I admit to some sym-
pathies with the prescriptive side of positivism myself, in Frederick Schauer, Constitu-
tional Positivism, 25 Conn. L. Rev. 797 (1993), but I believe the argument in the text
to be compatible with my being dead wrong in my normative views.
137 See David Lyons, Founders and Foundations of Legal Positivism, 82 Mich. L.
Rev. 722 (1984) (book review); Frederick Schauer, Fuller's Internal Point of View, 13
Law & Phil. 285 (1994); Frederick Schauer, Positivism as Pariah, in The Autonomy of
Law: Essays on Legal Positivism, supra note 64, at 31.

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1954 Virginia Law Review [Vol. 90:1909

ism's origins. Perhaps it would be best to jettison positivism's pre-

scriptive uses (which is not to say that positivism's descriptive uses
cannot be valuable in themselves). But then we need to be clear
that we have redefined positivism once again, rather than having
just provided the further explication of a longstanding tradition.
I do not mean to exclude Hart from a central place in the posi-
tivist tradition, and indeed there may be a dimension of Hart that
fits especially well with my focus on legal decisionmaking as a lim-
ited domain. This dimension, often ignored in contemporary de-
bates because it is not controversial, is the idea that a legal system
comes into existence upon the merger of primary and secondary
rules, with the latter distinguishing a legal system from simple or-
ders backed by force. Now if we think of the project even of con-
ceptual analytic jurisprudence as identifying those features that
have over time characterized all known understandings of law,138
then surely one of them is the idea of a system. Part of what makes
law different from numerous other normative activities, and nu-
merous other rule-governed activities, is its systematic nature, and
it would not be untoward to venture the thought that systematicity
is an essential part not only of all extant legal systems, but of the
concept of law itself.
If this is so, then a social practice of norm recognition that did
not have this systematic character might not even qualify as law.
Moreover, a focus on law's systematic nature is not only important
to Hart, but has been important to theorists throughout the positiv-
ist tradition.139 As a result, one way of understanding the idea of a
limited domain is as one form of just such systematicity. While
there may be others, the connection between the idea of law as a
limited domain and Hart's focus on the systematic nature of any-
thing qualifying as a legal system may from still another direction
connect the idea of law as a limited domain with the positivist tra-
dition, and may show that accounts of the nature of law-including
some versions of inclusive positivism-that fail to demonstrate this
systematic quality may be less faithful to the positivist idea than
some of their proponents have suggested.

38 Finnis, supra note 75, at 3-6.

See Brian H. Bix, 28 Aust. J. Legal Phil. 231, 236-37 (2003) (book review).

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2004] The Limited Domain of the Law 1955

CONCLUSION-UNDERSTANDING THE DIFFERENTIATION OF LAW

I conclude by emphasizing what should be obvious-my project

is not a semantic one, and I am not concerned here with defining
the word "law.""'0 I am instead concerned with understanding a r
lated set of seemingly differentiated (from the rest of society, but,
importantly, not much from each other) social institutions-law
schools, lawyers, judges, bar associations, law reviews, West Pub-
lishing, bar examinations, the Supreme Court, and most trial and
appellate courts, to take the most obvious members of the group.141
To understand what the members of this group hold in common
with each other but not with the members of most other social in-
stitutions is to try to understand not the meaning of the word
"law," and perhaps not even the concept of law,142 but the practice

140 An important analysis of the relationship between definitional and semantic pro-
jects, on the one hand, and conceptual ones, on the other, is in Jules L. Coleman &
Ori Simchen, "Law," 9 Legal Theory 1 (2003). Yet although I disclaim the semantic
project here, it is important to note a way in which it may be important. Just as Hart
and Fuller both believed that there was something genuinely morally and operation-
ally important about the application of the word "law" in the context of resistance to
official iniquity, so too might the same issues apply to the use of the word "law" in
questions about modern positivism. Although exclusive legal positivism does not en-
tail the conclusion that only that which is law should be taught in law schools, tested
on bar examinations, or argued in court, it may be too late in the semantic day to
draw that distinction for the population at large. If, sociologically and not conceptu-
ally, the definition of the word "law" will have causal effects on what we teach in law
school, what qualities we desire in lawyers, what we test for on bar examinations, and
what we welcome in legal argument, the exclusive positivist distinction between law
and legal reasoning or between law and the activities of the legal culture may have
unintended nonlogical consequences of narrowing the phenomenon of law as we
know it. That this not be so is obviously part of Dworkin's concern, even though he
denies the importance of the semantic approach to jurisprudence. Yet if it turns out to
be the case that legal argument and legal decision-the phenomenon of law-is in-
deed a limited domain, then Dworkin's project will have to be taken as far more pre-
scriptive than descriptive, an understanding that may again shift the terrain of juris-
prudential debate.
141 I say "most" trial and appellate courts only because there may be various dispute
resolution mechanisms-some mediation, some arbitration, most trials in traffic and
small claims courts presided over by non-legally trained magistrates, and so forth-
that are well out of the orbit of the cluster of institutions with which I am most con-
cerned.
142 Perhaps because of the title of Hart's book, and the debates that the book has
spawned, there is a rich jurisprudential literature devoted to the very question of what
it is to engage into a conceptual inquiry about law, and how such an inquiry differs (if
at all) from an inquiry into the meaning of the word "law." See Brian Bix, Conceptual
Questions and Jurisprudence, 1 Legal Theory 465 (1995). My own inquiry takes as its

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 1956 Virginia Law Review [Vol. 90:1909

(in the Wittgensteinian sense) of law as we know it and the institu-

tions of the law as we know them.143 My inquiry is directed not to
the concept of law but to the phenomenon of law. Such an inquiry
is partly and necessarily conceptual at the outset, but turns empiri-
cal more quickly than much of traditional analytic jurisprudence
(itself a practice) has seemed willing to confront. Understanding
law may well be fostered by various disciplines doing what they do
best, whether it be philosophy, or sociology, or economics, or
something else, but it may also be fostered by a willingness to move
as the inquiry demands from one such discipline to another. If un-
derstanding law as a limited domain (or not) is part of understand-
ing the nature of law, we may have to face up to difficult methodo-
logical as well as conceptual issues at the border between
philosophical and empirical inquiry.

initial data a cluster of institutions commonly designated as "legal," but the impetus
for the inquiry is the empirical overlap between the institutions themselves and not
the contingent fact that they happen to attract the same label.
143 Some of this phenomenon might be illuminated by considering the rich literature
on the sociology of professionalization. See Samuel Trosow, The Database and the
Fields of Law: Are There New Divisions of Labor?, 96 Law Libr. J. 63 (2004). There
is an interesting question whether professionalization follows the idea of a limited
domain of knowledge, or whether, by contrast, the creation and reinforcement of a
limited domain is a consequence rather than a cause of professionalization and pro-
fessional self-identity.

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