Principle, Practice, and Precedent: Vindicating Justice, According to Law

Legal judgment, I argue, entails moral judgment; legal obligations, correctly identified, are genuine moral obligations. Dworkin’s legal theory is instructive, but problematic: his account of integrity fails to provide a convincing reconciliation of practice and principle. We can, however, defend a superior account in which the moral ideals that we invoke to justify legal practice—affirming its legitimacy under certain conditions—retain their force throughout our judgments about its specific demands in particular cases. Common law reasoning exemplifies that approach, reflecting the interdependence of practice and principle. It is an internal, interpretative inquiry, drawing on the moral resources of our own tradition, treated as an influential guide to the requirements of justice. The law is constituted, accordingly, neither by its socially authoritative sources, whatever their merits, nor by the moral effects of our legal practice. It is rather the scheme of justice we construct in our continuing efforts to bring our practice closer to the ideals that inspire and redeem it