In the movie Regarding Henry, the main character, Henry Turner, is a lawyer who suffers brain damage as a result of being shot during a robbery. Before being wounded, the Old Henry Turner had been a successful lawyer, admired as a fierce competitor and well-known for his killer instinct. As a result of the injury to his brain, the New Henry Turner loses the personality traits that had made the Old Henry such a formidable adversary.

Social groups claim authority to impose restrictions on their members that the state cannot. Churches, ethnic groups, minority nations, universities, social clubs, and families all regulate belief and behavior in ways that would be obviously unjust in the context of a state and its citizens. All religions impose doctrinal requirements; many also enforce sexist practices and customs. Some universities impose stringent speech and conduct codes on their students and faculty. Parochial schools discriminate in their hiring practices. Those who complain about such internal restrictions on the liberties of members might well be told to “love it or leave it.”

This article considers the role of conceptual analysis in jurisprudence. In responding to the earlier article of Brian Bix, Conceptual Questions and Jurisprudence, 1 LegalTheory 465 (1995), it is agreed that the purpose of the theorist must be identified in order to evaluate the merits of the practice of conceptual analysis, but the approach taken here differs from that proposed by Bix. In particular, it is suggested that Bix is wrong to limit stipulation within conceptual analysis to a default option, and Bix's suggestion that jurisprudential analysis lacks an empirical basis is challenged. The approach developed in this article relies on a clarification of the relationships among terms, concepts, and fields of enquiry. It explores the different relationships that can exist between concepts. Seven general principles of the practice of conceptual analysis are expounded, and the proper scope of an evaluative element within conceptual analysis is considered. A final section briefly examines some of the wider implications of the approach to conceptual analysis proposed in the article.

In a recent article Brian Leiter concluded that a useful normative theory of adjudication is impossible. A normative theory of adjudication would be a theory that, among other things, identified the moral and political norms that judges ought to follow in determining the law for any particular legal dispute. Letter's elegant and subtle argument, stripped to its bones, runs as follows: Philosophers of law regard a correct normative theory of adjudication as being dependent upon an antecedent descriptive theory. The dependence here, as Leiter describes it, is of a very strong sort and unique among philosophical theories: Any normative theory, to be acceptable, cannot depart from the actual practice of judges and lawyers. Consequently, the content of the normative side of the theory is simply to “continue to do what you've been doing,” supplemented, perhaps, by Holme's injunction to do it more selfconsciously and explicitly.

I am grateful to Alan Madry and Joel Richeimer for their intelligent and stimulating critique of my article “Heidegger and the Theory of Adjudication.” It is the most interesting commentary I have seen on the paper, and I have learned much from it. It may facilitate discussion, and advance debate, to state with some clarity where exactly we agree and disagree. I leave to the footnotes discussion of certain minor points where Madry and Richeimer (hereafter “M&R”) are guilty of some critical overreaching.