•  1
    The infant in the snow
    In James W. Harris, Timothy Andrew Orville Endicott, Joshua Getzler & Edwin Peel (eds.), Properties of Law: Essays in Honour of Jim Harris, Oxford University Press. 2006.
    Suppose that you are wandering across the tundra, and you find an infant, all alone, in the snow. She is incapable of discourse, and yet she has the same human rights as anyone who is capable of discourse. Those rights do not depend on the practices or conventions of your people, or hers. Human discourse and human conventions play no role in human rights. I elaborate these claims through a critique of J.W. Harris’s groundbreaking analytical account of human rights. I conclude that some welfare r…Read more
  • The Value of Vagueness
    In Andrei Marmor & Scott Soames (eds.), Philosophical foundations of language in the law, Oxford University Press. 2011.
  • Law and Language
    In Jules Coleman & Scott J. Shapiro (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Jurisprudence and Philosophy of Law, Oxford University Press. 2002.
  • Raz on Gaps: The Surprising Part
    In Lukas H. Meyer, Stanley L. Paulson & Thomas W. Pogge (eds.), Rights, Culture and the Law: Themes From the Legal and Political Philosophy of Joseph Raz, Oxford University Press. 2003.
    In English law, there are various ways in which contracts can be invalid or unenforceable because they are immoral — and yet English lawyers know that many contracts are conclusively binding. The first two sources of legal gaps that Joseph Raz identifies do not seem surprising. Vagueness in the sources of law leads to gaps in borderline cases, and there is a gap if the law includes inconsistent rules, with no way of deciding which is effective. In those situations it seems right to say that the …Read more
  • Proportionality and incommensurability
    In Grant Huscroft, Bradley W. Miller & Grégoire C. N. Webber (eds.), Proportionality and the Rule of Law: Rights, Justification, Reasoning, Cambridge University Press. 2014.