Brian Leiter - Naturalizing Jurisprudence: Essays on American Legal Realism and Naturalism in Legal Philosophy

Brian Leiter

(p.iv)

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I have benefited from conversations with many philosophers and legal scholars over the years. The footnotes to individual papers mention those who helped with particular projects, but here I should like to acknowledge more general intellectual debts. My philosophical outlook and development owes much to the many fine teachers and fellow students I spent time with in graduate school; I should mention especially John Doris, Allan Gibbard, Alex Miller, Thomas Pogge, Peter Railton, Crispin Wright, and Jos Zalabardo. Although not interested in jurisprudence, Maudemarie Clark and Ken Gemes have been important sources of philosophical ideas and stimulation for the last fifteen years. With respect to legal philosophy and its problems, I have learned a tremendous amount from the writings of and conversations with Jules Coleman, John Gardner, Leslie Green, Stephen Perry, Joseph Raz, and Scott Shapiro. My debt to Green is, by now, particularly substantial: he has taught me more about jurisprudence than anyone else, and he has also been an invaluable colleague. More recently, I have enjoyed the philosophical stimulation of two new colleagues, John Deigh and Larry Laudan.

The University of Texas School of Law has been an ideal professional home, and many colleaguesI should mention especially Hans Baade, Mitch Berman, Willy Forbath, Mark Gergen, Basil Markesinis, Scot Powe, Bill Powers, and Larry Sagerhave done much to educate me about matters legal and jurisprudential. In the broader community of legal scholars, I have learned most from my oral and especially written exchanges with Ronald Allen and Richard Posner, as well as from my many conversations and correspondence with the late Milton Handler, from 1987 up until his death in 1998.

I particularly want to thank the many Deans and Associate Deans at Texas who offered unstinting support, and who provided me countless opportunities to try out many of the ideas and arguments in these essays with the many fine students who, over the past eleven years, have taken my courses and seminars, and helped me clarify and refine my thinking. Bill Powers, the former Dean and now President of the University, receives my special thanks for his commitment to our Law and Philosophy Program.

I am grateful to Jolyn Piercy, my wonderful administrative assistant, and Michael Sevel, one of our excellent JD/PhD students, for invaluable help in getting the manuscript ready for publication.

Sheila, Samuel, William, and Celia are, I am fairly sure, agnostic on whether jurisprudence should be naturalized, and for that, and so much else, I love them (p.viii) dearly. This collection is dedicated with warm gratitude to my father, Maurice Leiter, whose steadfast supportmaterial, moral, and intellectualof my academic pursuits across the decades has made this work possible.

B.L.

Austin, Texas

September 15, 2006

All essays have been reprinted with permission of the original publisher.

Essay 1: Rethinking Legal Realism: Toward a Naturalized Jurisprudence, reprinted from Texas Law Review, vol. 76 (December 1997), pp. 267315. Copyright 1997 by the Texas Law Review Association.

Essay 2: Legal Realism and Legal Positivism Reconsidered, reprinted from Ethics, vol. 111 (January 2001), pp. 278301. Publised by the University of Chicago Press. This essay was also reprinted as one of the ten best articles in philosophy for 2001 in P. Grim et al. (eds.), The Philosophers Annual, Volume 24 (Stanford: CSLI Publications, 2003). Copyright 2001 by the University of Chicago.

Essay 3: Is There an American Jurisprudence? reprinted from Oxford Journal of Legal Studies, vol. 17 (Summer 1997), pp. 36787.

Essay 4: Legal Realism, Hard Positivism, and the Limits of Conceptual Analysis, reprinted from J.L. Coleman (ed.), Harts Postscript (Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 35570. This was itself a slightly revised version of Realism, Hard Positivism, and Conceptual Analysis, which appeared in Legal Theory, vol. 4 (December 1998), pp. 53347, published by Cambridge University Press.

Essay 5: Why Quine is Not a Postmodernist, reprinted from Southern Methodist University Law Review, vol. 50 (JulyAugust 1997), pp. 173954. This was part of a symposium on Dennis Pattersons book Law and Truth. Published by Southern Methodist University Law Review and the Southern Methodist University Dedman School of Law.

Essay 6: Beyond the Hart/Dworkin Debate: The Methodology Problem in Jurisprudence, reprinted from