文档介绍：The Concept and the Rule of Law
Jeremy Waldron1
I: Introduction
What is the relation between the concept of law and the Rule of Law? The
question e up before in jurisprudence,2 but it seems worth raising
again, if only as a way of trying to rescue analytic legal philosophy from the
inbred sterility of its current research Let us begin with a brief
sense of the terms of the question: (i) the concept of law and (ii) the Rule of
Law.
(i) The concept of law.
Analytic legal philosophers (like Jeremy Bentham, John Austin, .
Hart, Jules Coleman, and Joseph Raz) ask and answer questions like these:
“What is law?”“What is a proposition of law?”“What is legal validity?”
They make a study of the concept of law. They intend that study to help
clarify the meaning of straightforward propositions such as “It is against the
law to drive faster than 70 kilometers per hour” as well as more
1 University Professor in the School of Law, New York University. I am grateful to Mark
t, Jules Coleman, Ronald Dworkin, David Dyzenhaus, Kent Greenawalt, Stephen Perry,
Joseph Raz, Scott Shapiro, Tom Campbell, and Ben Zipursky for discussions of this topic over
the years. This paper was originally prepared for the Second Congress on the Philosophy of Law,
Institute of Law Research, Mexico City, March 27-31, 2006. It benefited there ments
by Mitch Berman, Tom Campbell, Julie Dixon, Imer Flores, Andrei Marmor, Enrique Villanueva,
and Will Waluchow.
2 See, ., Fuller 1969, Dworkin 2004, Simmonds 2005, and t 2005.
3 For a forceful opinion of the sterility of modern analytical legal philosophy—particularly the
research program of modern positivism—see Dworkin 2002, 1677-80.
controversial propositions such as “It is lawful in certain circumstances for
police officers to enter private dwellings without knocking.”4 They also
intend their study of the concept of law to explicate and illuminate claims
about the existence