Does Law Have a Function? A Comment on the Two-Level Theory of Decision

What, in general, is a good reason for decision by a court of law? This is the question of jurisprudence; it has been asked in an amazing number of forms, of which the classic What is Law ? is only the briefest. I propose to consider, in this Comment, one recent answer to this question - that supplied by Professor Richard Wasserstrom in his book, The Judicial Decision. I do so because Professor Wasserstrom\u27s argument shares with much other recent jurisprudence some dubious and generally unrecognized assumptions about the logic of legal justification. My principal purpose is to expose these assumptions