Book Review: Analysis of Knowledge and Valuation

Most of our judges and law professors spend a large part of their livesjustifying or criticizing various human arrangements known as legalrules or decisions, and yet when the circuit of their tasks is interruptedby an inquiry into just what it is that they are doing when they justifyor criticize, they are apt to react with more heat than light. For theintellectual fashion of our times requires them to hold that justificationand criticism are matters of personal emotion and uncertainty, while thedictates of their profession require them also to maintain that what theyare doing has a firm basis in certain and objective truth. Faced with the modern version of Samson\u27s riddle - how to drawthe honey of objective certainty from the lions of passion and emotionour jurists have offered three divergent answers, none of which cancommand much respect. Some have denied that there can be any certaintyor objectivity in law, but the most energetic of these, upon donningjudicial robes, has had to profess an appeal to something more thanthe uncertainties of his own subjective emotions when he has reversed thedecision of a lower court. At the other extreme, there are a few judgesand law teachers who, under the influence of Thomism, Marxism, orsome other absolutistic metaphysics, insist that the certainties of law areproperly derivable from the certainties of morality. But the great majorityof those who write professorial texts or judicial opinions try tosave the certainty of law and the uncertainty of ethics by denying thatlaw and ethics have any necessary connection with one another