“A legal system exists,” Joseph Raz claims, “if and only if it is in force.” By this he means to suggest that the efficacy of law—that is, its capacity to control the population to which it applies—is necessary for its identity as such. Despite widespread recognition that efficacy is a condition of the existence of law, however, little time has been spent analyzing the notion. This article begins an attempt to make up the deficit. I make the case for efficacy as necessary for law and go on to develop and defend an account of the concept that is broadly Kelsenian in spirit. In doing so I address questions concerning the relationship between obedience and enforcement in an account of the existence of a legal system as well as relating the discussion to that concerning the ontological status of international law.

This article introduces a significant yet largely overlooked problem in the law of torts: causal underdetermination. This problem occurs when the causal inquiry of a but-for test produces not one but two results, which are contradictory. According to the first, the negligent defendant is the likely cause of the plaintiff's injury, whereas according to the second, she is not. The article explains why causal underdetermination has escaped the radar of tort scholars and is perceived by courts as lack of causation. It demonstrates that the current practice in cases of causal underdetermination might lead to erroneous decisions, absolving negligent defendants of tort liability even when the evidence suggests that they are in fact the likely cause of the plaintiff's injury. This, in turn, the article asserts, may not only lead to underdeterrence among potential defendants, but also encourage manipulative litigation strategy to escape liability in retrospect. The article then proposes solutions that contend with causal underdetermination and resolve the difficulties that the current practice entails.

An influential view in recent philosophy of punishment is that the apparatus of criminal justice should be geared at least in part to state censure of wrongdoing. I argue that if it were to be so geared, such an apparatus would make ambitious claims to authority, and that the legitimacy of the relevant state would then depend on whether those claims can be vindicated. This paper looks first at what kind of authority is being claimed by this apparatus. The criminal law, I argue, cannot merely be thought of as claiming a right to rule and to be obeyed. Rather, its authority is better understood as the authority of moral oversight: a power to alter, at will (though within certain limits), citizens’ liability to answer for their compliance with—and to be officially censured for their failure to comply with—a designated set of pre-existing moral 7reasons. The paper then looks at whether a state could realistically be expected to possess such authority—that is, whether a state that claims to have such a power could ever be legitimate.

The idea of “church autonomy” has risen to prominence in law and religion discourse in recent years. Defenders argue that church autonomy is essential to protecting religious freedom, while critics argue that it permits great harm. This heated dispute often obscures the fact that religious group autonomy is not all-or-nothing. Religious organizations can enjoy some autonomy without being free from all legal oversight. This article thus seeks to make progress in the debate by providing a taxonomy of kinds of judicial examination of religious organizations’ decisions—focusing on employment decisions—and normatively assessing each kind. I argue that religious groups should enjoy protection from certain kinds of examination, but other kinds are justifiable, and even required. My argument supports an approach similar to that seen in some recent European Court of Human Rights decisions, rather than the less discriminating approach of U.S. courts.

All observers of our legal system recognize that criminal statutes can be complex and obscure. But statutory obscurity often takes a particular form that most observers have overlooked: uncertainty about the identity of the wrong a statute aims to punish. It is not uncommon for parties to disagree about the identity of the underlying wrong even as they agree on the statute's elements. Hidden in plain sight, these unexamined disagreements underlie or exacerbate an assortment of familiar disputes—about venue, vagueness, and mens rea; about DUI and statutory rape; about hate crimes, child pornography, and counterterrorism laws; about proportionality in punishment; and about the proper ambit of the criminal law. Each of these disputes may hinge on deeper disagreements about the identity of the wrong a statute aims to punish, and these deeper disagreements can be surprisingly hard to resolve, fueled as they are by the complex inner structure of our penal laws and the discretionary mechanisms of their administration.

In a recent paper, Michael Pardo argues that the epistemic property that is legally relevant is the one called Safety, rather than Sensitivity. In the process, he argues against our Sensitivity-related account of statistical evidence. Here we revisit these issues, partly in order to respond to Pardo, and partly in order to make general claims about legal epistemology. We clarify our account, we show how it adequately deals with counterexamples and other worries, we raise suspicions about Safety's value here, and we revisit our general skepticism about the role that epistemological considerations should play in determining legal policy.

It is commonly held that we wrong someone if we punish them without first determining whether they are guilty through the process of a sufficiently fair and reliable procedure. This wrong is best explained by pre-institutional moral procedural rights. Recently, Christopher Heath Wellman has argued for the skeptical conclusion that there are no such rights, challenging a widely held orthodoxy. I propose two novel grounds for pre-institutional moral procedural rights and so answer Wellman's skepticism. First, we have rights not to be subject to punitive systems that do not include specific sorts of reliable procedures because otherwise we are subject to unreasonable risks of undeserved punishment. Second, not only do we have rights that others not harm us or unreasonably risk harming us, we have rights that they control for avoiding wrongfully harming us across relevant close possible worlds.

The “small improvement problem” (“the Problem”) applies when no option in a comparison is best nor, it seems, are the options equal, because a small improvement to one would fail to make it the better choice. I argue that vagueness causes the Problem, such that the options are vaguely equal or vaguely “related.” I then unpack an important instance of the Problem, the comparison between a crime and a punishment upon which the ideal of a retributively deserved sentence is based. I argue that this comparison is not only vague, but remarkably vague, leading to an expansive array of “not undeserved” sentences. I conclude, however, that retributivism can only justify the least harmful “not undeserved” sentence.

It is common to think that what theory of linguistic vagueness is correct has implications for debates in philosophy of law. I disagree. I argue that the implications of particular theories of vagueness on substantive issues of legal theory and practice are less far-reaching than often thought. I focus on four putative implications discussed in the literature concerning (i) the value of vagueness in the law, (ii) the possibility and value of legal indeterminacy, (iii) the possibility of the rule of law, and (iv) strong discretion. I conclude with some methodological remarks. Delineating questions about conventional meaning, legal content determination, and norms of legal interpretation and judicial practice can motivate clearer answers and a more refined understanding of the space of overall theories of vagueness, interpretation, and law.

According to the influential “expressive” argument for hate speech laws, legal restrictions on hate speech are justified, in significant part, because they powerfully express opposition to hate speech. Yet the expressive argument faces a challenge: why couldn't we communicate opposition to hate speech via counterspeech, rather than bans? I argue that the expressive argument cannot address this challenge satisfactorily. Specifically, I examine three considerations that purport to explain bans’ expressive distinctiveness: considerations of strength; considerations of directness; and considerations of complicity. These considerations either fail to establish that bans are expressively superior to counterspeech, or presuppose that bans successfully deter hate speech. This result severely undercuts the expressive argument's appeal. First, contrary to what its proponents suggest, this argument fails to circumvent the protracted empirical controversies surrounding bans’ effectiveness as deterrents. Second, the expressive argument appears redundant, because bans are expressively distinctive only insofar as hate speech is already suppressed.

To whom is a duty owed? Contractualism answers with an interest theory of direction. As such, it faces three challenges. The Conceptual Challenge requires acknowledgment that a duty is conceptually distinct from an interest. The Extensional Challenge requires an account of cases in which one who is owed a duty does not take an interest in the duty, or does not take as much of an interest as someone who is not owed the duty. The Positivist Challenge requires explanation of the great flexibility of law and other social practices in positing duties that do not reflect the landscape of moral interests. Contractualism can be shown to meet these challenges once we acknowledge the centrality of the idea of a generic interest. Focusing on generic interests also illuminates the distinctive form of respect involved in directedness.

Law being a derivative feature of reality, it exists in virtue of more fundamental things, upon which it depends. This raises the question of what is the relation of dependence that holds between law and its more basic determinants. The primary aim of this paper is to argue that grounding is that relation. We first make a positive case for this claim, and then we defend it from the potential objection that the relevant relation is rather rational determination.1 Against this challenge, we argue that the apparent objection is really no objection, for on its best understanding, rational determination turns out to actually be grounding. Finally, we clarify the framework for theories on law-determination that results from embracing our view; by way of illustration, we offer a ground-theoretic interpretation of Hartian positivism and show how it can defuse an influential challenge to simple positivist accounts of law.