• More Easily Done Than Said: Rules Reasons and Rational Choice
    Canadian Law and Economics Association C/o Faculty of Law, University of Toronto. 1995.
    This paper offers an account of the important role which an obligation to provide reasons can play in avoiding some of the systematic difficulties encountered in the theory of rational social choice. The paper builds on some of the insights offered by theories of structure-induced equilibrium. It argues that the obligation to provide reasons for certain choices, reasons which must be articulated and structured around a set of generally shared and publicly comprehensible categories of thought, ca…Read more
  • Alternative Approaches to Legal Scholarship
    with Denise Réaume
    Faculty of Law, University of Toronto. 1993.
  • Alternative Approaches to Legal Scholarship
    with Robert Howse
    Faculty of Law, University of Toronto. 1993.
  •  32
    More Easily Done Than Said: Rules, Reasons and Rational Social Choice
    Oxford Journal of Legal Studies 18 (2): 293-329. 1998.
    Legal decision-making emphasizes, in a very self-conscious way, the justificatory significance of reasons. This paper argues that the obligation to provide reasons for choices, which must be articulated and structured around a set of generally shared and publicly comprehensible categories of thought, can serve to make the space of possible choices ‘concept sensitive’ in a very useful way. In particular, concept sensitivity has the effect of restricting certain movements within the choice space s…Read more
  •  1
    Values in the Law of Tort: A Symposium : Introduction
    with Michael D. Bayles
    Law and Philosophy 2 (1): 3-4. 1983.
  • Values in the Law of Tort: A Symposium: Introduction
    with Michael D. Bayles
    Law and Philosophy 1 (3): 3-4. 1982.
  •  24
    Ethics in Government (review)
    Teaching Philosophy 7 (2): 178-179. 1984.
  •  31
    Law Games: Defeasible Rules and Revisable Rationality
    Law and Philosophy 17 (4): 443-480. 1998.
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  •  66
    Rational aggregation
    Politics, Philosophy and Economics 1 (3): 337-354. 2002.
    In two recent papers, Christian List and Philip Pettit have argued that there is a problem in the aggregation of reasoned judgements that is akin to the aggregation of the preference problem in social choice theory. 1 Indeed, List and Pettit prove a new general impossibility theorem for the aggregation of judgements, and provide a propositional interpretation of the social choice problem that suggests it is a special case of their impossibility result. 2 Specifically, they show that no judgement…Read more
  • Defeasible rules and interpersonal accountability
    In Jordi Ferrer Beltrán & Giovanni Battista Ratti (eds.), The Logic of Legal Requirements: Essays on Defeasibility, Oxford University Press. 2012.
    Defeasible rules are said to allow for the following two-staged sequence, viz., that p → q and yet p & r → not-q. This is puzzling because in the logic of conditionals the sufficiency of p for q cannot normally be undermined if one adds to the antecedent a further proposition r. Critics argue that the better approach to comprehending defeasibility is explicitly to represent the limiting factor r in a single-stage articulation of the rule, viz., as p & not-r → q. This is a more complete statement…Read more