Xi Zhang

This Review Essay reviews the book, ‘The Morality in Law: Themes From the Work of Leslie Green’ (OUP 2025), an edited collection on the work of Green, which aspires to honour Green’s significant contributions to the discipline of jurisprudence over the past four decades as well as his inestimable impact on the fields of legal, moral, and political philosophy. Considering this book is not a monograph by a single author but rather an edited collection, it seems more thematically sensible and practically plausible for this Review Essay to flesh out some common features and underlying concerns arising from and manifested in Green’s work. In this way, this Review Essay observes the multifacetedness of Green’s jurisprudential vista with reference to this book as well as Green’s other jurisprudential work. By doing so, it endeavours to gain a better grasp of Green as an academic – a reflective legal positivist, an unbounded legal philosopher, and a thoughtful legal curator – in addition to his scholarship. With this book as our companion, it promises to be a fruitful and fulfilling journey as we explore and experience Green’s voyage of jurisprudence — the ‘Greenyssey’, if we may speak so.

This paper aims to explore one significant yet insufficiently elaborated aspect of valuing, namely the positional nature of valuing, which essentially reveals the fact that the valuer occupies a particular position or takes a specific viewpoint in relation to the object being valued. This positional nature of valuing does not merely embody a specific viewpoint from which the valuer’s beliefs, attitudes, reasons, and emotions are conveyed in a complex manner towards the valued object, but also constitute a particular position from which the valuer engages with the valued object in a reason-giving manner. As systematically elaborated and lucidly revealed by this paper, this positional nature of valuing will on the one hand elucidate the conceptual interlock between ‘valuing’ and ‘valuable’ along the value-reason nexus with reference to arguments by T.M. Scanlon and Samuel Scheffler. On the other hand, it will also illuminate why we may have reason to value something from the perspective of practical reasoning.