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10Contents Versus Existence-Conditions: A Brief Reply to John MorssAmerican Journal of Jurisprudence 53 (1): 101-103. 2008.
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52Crime, punishment, and responsibility: the jurisprudence of Antony Duff (edited book)Oxford University Press. 2011.This volume collects essays by leading criminal law theorists to explore the principal themes in his work.
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28Of final things: Morality as one of the ultimate determinants of legal validity (review)Law and Philosophy 24 (1): 47-97. 2004.
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42Michael Moore on Torture, Morality, and LawRatio Juris 25 (4): 472-495. 2012.During the past few decades, Michael Moore has written incisively on an array of matters concerning the relationships between law and morality. While reflecting on those relationships, he has plumbed the nature of morality itself in impressive depth. Among the topics which he has addressed, the problem of torture has been prominent and controversial. It is a problem, moreover, that has led to some of his most searching enquiries into the character of moral obligations. In the present essay I tak…Read more
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71The Quality of FreedomOxford University Press. 2008.In his provocative book Matthew Kramer offers a systematic theory of freedom that challenges most of the other major contemporary treatments of the topic.
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In Defense of Legal Positivism: Law without TrimmingsPhilosophical Quarterly 50 (200): 422-425. 2000.
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75Torture and Moral Integrity: A Philosophical EnquiryOxford University Press. 2014.The morality of interrogational torture has been the subject of heated debate in recent years. In explaining why torture is morally wrong, Kramer engages in deep philosophical reflections on the nature of morality and on moral conflicts
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38Freedom, unfreedom and Skinner's HobbesJournal of Political Philosophy 9 (2). 2001.In an array of writings stretching over the better part of two decades, Quentin Skinner has repeatedly challenged the modern conception of negative liberty developed by Isaiah Berlin and many other theorists. He has sought to draw attention to some once vibrant but now largely peripheral traditions of thought—especially the civic‐republican or neo‐Roman tradition—in order to highlight what he sees as the limitedness and inadequacies of the currently dominant ways of thinking about freedom. The p…Read more
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Consistency is hardly ever enough: reflections on Hillel Steiner's methodologyIn Stephen De Wijze, Matthew H. Kramer & Ian Carter (eds.), Hillel Steiner and the Anatomy of Justice: Themes and Challenges, Routledge. 2009.
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26Review of Arthur Ripstein (ed.), Ronald Dworkin (review)Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2008 (1). 2008.
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1338In Defense of HartIn Wil Waluchow & Stefan Sciaraffa (eds.), Philosophical Foundations of the Nature of Law, Oxford University Press. pp. 22. 2013.In Legality Scott Shapiro seeks to provide the motivation for the development of his own elaborate account of law by undertaking a critique of H.L.A. Hart's jurisprudential theory. Hart maintained that every legal system is underlain by a rule of recognition through which officials of the system identify the norms that belong to the system as laws. Shapiro argues that Hart's remarks on the rule of recognition are confused and that his model of lawis consequently untenable. Shapiro contends that …Read more
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87No Better Reasons: A Reply to Alan GewirthSouthern Journal of Philosophy 36 (1): 131-139. 2010.Alan Gewirth has propounded a moral theory which commits him to the view that prescriptions can appropriately be addressed to people who have neither any moral reasons nor any prudential reasons to follow the prescriptions. We highlight the strangeness of Gewirth's position and then show that it undermines his attempt to come up with a supreme moral principle
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89Where law and morality meetOxford University Press. 2004.How are law and morality connected, how do they interact, and in what ways are they distinct? In Part I of this book, Matthew Kramer argues that moral principles can enter into the law of any jurisdiction. He contends that legal officials can invoke moral principles as laws for resolving disputes, and that they can also invoke them as threshold tests which ordinary laws must satisfy. In opposition to many other theorists, Kramer argues that these functions of moral principles are consistent with…Read more
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174John Locke and the origins of private property: philosophical explorations of individualism, community, and equalityCambridge University Press. 1997.John Locke's labor theory of property is one of the seminal ideas of political philosophy and served to establish its author's reputation as one of the leading social and political thinkers of all time. Through it Locke addressed many of his most pressing concerns, and earned a reputation as an outstanding spokesman for political individualism - a reputation that lingers widely despite some partial challenges that have been raised in recent years. In this major new study Matthew Kramer offers an…Read more
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824There’s Nothing Quasi About Quasi-Realism: Moral Realism as a Moral DoctrineThe Journal of Ethics 21 (2): 185-212. 2017.This paper seeks to clarify and defend the proposition that moral realism is best elaborated as a moral doctrine. I begin by upholding Ronald Dworkin’s anti-Archimedean critique of the error theory against some strictures by Michael Smith, and I then briefly suggest how a proponent of moral realism as a moral doctrine would respond to Smith’s defense of the Archimedeanism of expressivism. Thereafter, this paper moves to its chief endeavor. By differentiating clearly between expressivism and quas…Read more
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14Reason Without Reasons: A Critique of Alan Gewirth's Moral PhilosophySouthern Journal of Philosophy 34 (3): 301-315. 2010.
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8Do Animals and Dead People Have Legal Rights?Canadian Journal of Law and Jurisprudence 14 (1): 29-54. 2001.This essay maintains that the question in its title is really three sets of questions: a conceptual inquiry, a moral/political inquiry, and an empirical inquiry. After devoting some attention to the relevant conceptual issues, the essay ponders in detail the moral/political issues. It suggests some answers to the germane moral/political questions, and it takes pains to distinguish those questions from other lines of inquiry with which they might be confused. Although only animals and dead people…Read more
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19Hillel Steiner and the Anatomy of Justice: Themes and Challenges (edited book)Routledge. 2009.Throughout the English-speaking world, and in the many other countries where analytic philosophy is studied, Hillel Steiner is esteemed as one of the foremost contemporary political philosophers. This volume is designed as a festschrift for Steiner and as an important collection of philosophical essays in its own right. The editors have assembled a roster of highly distinguished international contributors, all of whom are eager to pay tribute to Steiner by focusing on topics on which he himself …Read more
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48On the counterfactual dimension of negative libertyPolitics, Philosophy and Economics 2 (1): 63-92. 2003.This article explores some implications of the counterfactual aspect of freedom and unfreedom. Because actions can be unprevented even if they are not undertaken, and conversely because actions can be prevented even if they are not attempted and are thus not overtly thwarted, any adequate account of negative liberty must ponder numerous counterfactual chains of events. Each person's freedom or unfreedom is affected not only by what others in fact do, but also by what they are disposed to do. The…Read more
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48Ronald Dworkin, Justice in Robes: Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 2006, £22.95/$35.00, ISBN 067402167-3, 308 ppCriminal Law and Philosophy 1 (3): 337-342. 2007.
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107Moral principles and legal validityRatio Juris 22 (1): 44-61. 2009.Two recent high-quality articles, including one in this journal, have challenged the Inclusivist and Incorporationist varieties of legal positivism. David Lefkowitz and Michael Giudice, writing from perspectives heavily influenced by the work of Joseph Raz, have endeavored—in sophisticated and interestingly distinct ways—to vindicate Raz's contention that moral principles are never among the law-validating criteria in any legal system nor among the laws that are applied as binding bases for adju…Read more
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69Is Law’s Conventionality Consistent with Law’s Objectivity?Res Publica 14 (4): 241-252. 2008.Legal positivism’s multi-faceted insistence on the separability of law and morality includes an insistence on the thoroughly conventional status of legal norms as legal norms. Yet the positivist affirmation of the conventionality of law may initially seem at odds with the mind-independence of the existence and contents and implications of legal norms. Mind-independence, a central aspect of legal objectivity, has been seen by some theorists as incompatible with the mind-dependence of conventions.…Read more
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1The Big Bad Wolf: Legal Positivism and Its DetractorsAmerican Journal of Jurisprudence 48 1-10. 2003.
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50G. A. Cohen's Conception of Law: A CritiqueRatio Juris 2 (3): 283-298. 1989.This note will challenge G. A. Cohen's view of the interaction between legal systems and economic structures; such interaction raises the so‐called problem of legality, which Cohen sets out to solve in the eighth chapter of Karl Marx's Theory of History . In the course of this note, we shall interrogate the presumed rigor of Cohen's theory of base/superstructure relations, to which his understanding of law is central. His approach will not be simply destroyed, but will be resituated in a network…Read more
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35Critical Legal Theory and the Challenge of Feminism: A Philosophical ReconceptionRowman & Littlefield Publishers. 1994.Critical Legal Theory and the Challenge of Feminism provides both a thorough overview and a refinement of the ideas that underlie critical legal theory. Arguing with the rigor of analytic philosophy and the alertness to paradoxes characteristic of deconstructive philosophy, Matthew Kramer begins by exploring the tangled relations between metaphysics and politics. He then attempts to transform the discourses of the critical legal studies movement by laying out a framework of five general themes: …Read more
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31Hobbes and the Paradoxes of Political Origins.John Locke and the Origins of Private Property: Philosophical Explorations of Individualism, Community, and EqualityPhilosophical Review 108 (1): 146. 1999.Each of these two volumes grew out of what was originially intended to be a single chapter in a larger study of seventeenth-century liberalism. Although there is a strong degree of stylistic and methodological continuity between the two, neither book presupposes any familiarity with the other. I will therefore consider them separately.