WHAT CONTEMPORARY LIBERAL LEGAL THEORISTS CAN LEARN FROM ARISTOTLE

American legal theorists have long been preoccupied with questions about method and truth in legal and moral reasoning. Their inquiries have focused on whether and how citizens, lawmakers, judges, and other public officials can attain truth, correctness, or certainty in their legal and moral pronouncements.1 Until the last decades of the nineteenth century, American legal theory was dominated by formalist views, which saw legal reasoning in the ideal case as a closed, deductive system based upon a finite number of foundational principles and rules. By the beginning of the twentieth century, formalism as an ideal was under attack by adherents of legal realism and sociological jurisprudence.2 Members of the latter two schools of thought argued that the legal system was in fact and of necessity uncertain and imprecise, assessed by such measures as the lack of predictability of judicial decisions and the absence of a unique, correct solution to particular legal questions. The source of legal uncertainty was explained by members of these schools of thought in terms of one or more of the following circumstances. For some, the law’s foundational principles, statutory and common law rules, and specific judicial decisions do not form a coherent whole. Therefore, reliance on them can yield inconsistent, even contradictory results. Others argued that the human and commercial situations to which law applies are themselve