Prescriptive rules guide human behavior across various domains of community life, including law, morality, and etiquette. What, specifically, are rules in the eyes of their subjects, i.e., those who are expected to abide by them? Over the last sixty years, theorists in the philosophy of law have offered a useful framework with which to consider this question. Some, following H. L. A. Hart, argue that a rule’s text at least sometimes suffices to determine whether the rule itself covers a case. Others, in the spirit of Lon Fuller, believe that there is no way to understand a rule without invoking its purpose — the benevolent ends which it is meant to advance. In this paper we ask whether people associate rules with their textual formulation or their underlying purpose. We find that both text and purpose guide people’s reasoning about the scope of a rule. Overall, a rule’s text more strongly contributed to rule infraction decisions than did its purpose. The balance of these considerations, however, varied across experimental conditions: In conditions favoring a spontaneous judgment, rule interpretation was affected by moral purposes, whereas analytic conditions resulted in a greater adherence to textual interpretations. In sum, our findings suggest that the philosophical debate between textualism and purposivism partly reflects two broader approaches to normative reasoning that vary within and across individuals.

This is the edited transcript of a seminar on 27 February 2020 organised at Warwick Law School in appreciation of the work of Peter Fitzpatrick. Peter was seriously ill at the time but was desirous of online participation. Sadly, the seminar was the last public performance by Peter prior to his death. A variety of themes in Peter's work are discussed, including his critique of H.L.A. Hart, his notion of ‘slow reading’, the relationship between theory and grounded engagement with people, the idea of community and relationality, the role of the critic, self-criticism, the impossibility of law, decoloniality, occidentalism, mythologies and governmentality, and the significance of narratives.

“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.

In this investigation the effects of immune activation on the brain are characterized. In order to study this, we used a model for chronic immune activation, the myocardial infarction, and intravenous injections with the pro-inflammatory cytokine Tumour Necrosis Factor alpha (TNF-α). The incentive for this study is the observation that myocardial infarction is accompanied by behavioural and neuronal abnormalities. The effects of myocardial infarction on the brain and its functioning are widespread. In order to examine the mechanism through which this interaction occurs, a group of rats underwent an experimentally induced myocardial infarction whereafter immunohistochemistry was performed on slices of the brain. This experiment revealed regional serum protein extravasation, pointing to leakage of the blood-brain barrier. This process occurred in certain cortical, subcortical and hindbrain areas in discrete patches. The leakage was co-localized with the expression of the immune activation marker ICAM-1. A second group of rats was therefore injected with TNF-α, a major pro-inflammatory cytokine, to assess the involvement of the immune system in the effects shown. This procedure rendered the same results. It is concluded that myocardial infarction may interfere with the integrity of the blood-brain barrier and possibly with brain functioning through activation of the immune system. The relevance for pathophysiological processes is discussed.

In The Concept of Law, H.L.A. Hart suggested that four formal features of morality distinguish it from law: importance, immunity from deliberate change, the nature of moral offences and the form of moral pressure. On closer examination, none of these supposed features clearly distinguishes morality from law, at least in the broad sense of ‘morality’ that Hart adopted. However, a fifth feature of morality mentioned by Hart – namely the role that morality plays in practical reasoning as a source of ultimate standards for assessing human conduct – does illuminate the relationship between law as conceptualised by Hart and morality variously understood. Because morality has this feature, law is always subject to moral assessment, and moral reasons trump legal reasons. It does not follow, however, that law is irrelevant to moral reasoning.