Abstract

Scott Shapiro offers an elaboration and defense of “legal positivism,” in which the official acceptance of a plan figures as the central explanatory notion. Rich in both ambition and insight, Legality casts an edifying new light on the structure of positive law and its officialdom. As a defense of positivism, however, it exhibits the odd feature that its main claims will prove quite acceptable to the natural lawyer. Perhaps this betokens – what many have begun to suspect anyway – that our usual tests for classifying legal theories are, in the present state of discussion, no longer credible. In any case, my hope in the following remarks is to suggest how certain ambiguities in Legality might easily be resolved in favor of Planning Natural Law. The Planning Theory of Law, in other words, is not proprietary to positivism