Billions of dollars have been spent on law and development (or “rule of law”) projects around the world in the past two decades, focusing on judicial reform, legal training, constitution and code writing, legal transplantation, anti-corruption efforts, and more. In recent overviews, many...

Our legal tradition contains two fundamental pillars: the rule of law ideal, and an instrumental view of law. Although we take both for granted, in certain respects they are a mismatched pair. This article explores four specific points of tension between these two central streams of thought. The...

For several generations now, legal scholars in the United States have framed debates about law and judging in terms of formalism-versus-realism. This entrenched framework is grounded in a widely accepted historical account. In this essay, I dismantle this antithesis and reconstruct their...

Political scientists regularly assert that judges are deluded or deceptive about the nature of judicial decision making. This article shows, to the contrary, that for more than a century judges have candidly expressed a balanced realism about judging. Judges admit that sometimes they must make...

Law involves institutions rooted in the history of a society that evolve in relation to surrounding social, psychological, cultural, economic, political, technological, and ecological influences. Law must be understood naturalistically, historically, and holistically. In my usage, naturalism...

Natural law has burst onto the American legal scene with the publication of Adrian Vermeule’s Common Good Constitutionalism (2022). A prominent constitutional and administrative law scholar, Vermeule castigates originalist jurisprudence as a fraudulent illusion perpetuated by conservatives to...

A philosophical account that appears to be gaining momentum of late among legal philosophers is that law is an artifact. Artifacts are generally understood by philosophers to be intentionally created functional objects, and the intended function determines what kind of artifact it is. Artifact...

This essay addresses core theoretical issues surrounding global/transnational legal pluralism, taking up the work of leading theorists. First, I demonstrate that global legal pluralism is very different from earlier versions of legal pluralism (postcolonial and sociological). Next, I expose the...