Abstract

This dissertation is an inquiry into the nature of legal statements. Legal statements are normative statements, and they have a peculiar normative force that distinguishes them from other normative statements, including ethical statements. In uttering a legal statement, a speaker aims to initiate or maintain a form of coordination with his audience. I propose a novel expressivist or noncognitivist analysis of legal statements to account for or capture this peculiar normative force. ;In the first, ground-clearing chapter, I scrutinize Ronald Dworkin's influential diagnosis and criticism of H. L. A. Hart's analysis of legal statements. I take issue with both Dworkin's interpretation of Hart's analysis and his argument to the effect that Hart is unable to account for some genuine legal disagreements. ;In the second, largely historical chapter, I argue for an interpretation of Hart's analysis of legal statements that departs sharply from Dworkin's influential interpretation. In effect, I argue that Hart developed an expressivist or noncognitivist analysis of legal statements that bears strong influences of his predecessors and contemporaries who advocated expressivist or noncognitivist analyses of ethical statements. ;The third chapter is the heart of the dissertation. In it, I point to a number of problems with Hart's analysis and then revise it in a series of steps to eventually arrive at a novel expressivist or noncognitivist analysis. What results is an analysis that portrays a speaker of a legal statement as aiming at initiation or maintenance of a certain form of coordination with his audience. ;In the fourth and final chapter, I confront Joseph Raz's arguments that question the viability of the sort of analysis of normative statements that Hart, and following him I, offer. I argue that the analysis I propose in chapter 3 can be naturally extended to explain uncommitted uses of the legal language. And I also argue in favor of what may be called "describability"---the assumption that the workings of normative discourses can be characterized adequately in purely descriptive language, without resorting to any normative predicates