Determinacy, Objectivity and Authority

Abstract

Since the 1970s, analytic jurisprudence has been under attack from what has come to be known as the Critical Legal Studies ("CLS") movement. CLS has been joined in this attack by proponents of FeministJurisprudence, and, most recently, by proponents of Critical Race Theory. When the battle lines are drawn in this way, the importance of the distinctions between the Natural Law and Positivist traditions are easily missed. Whatever distinguishes Hart from Dworkin, and both from Lon Fuller, matters very little from this point of view, as compared to what (theoretically at least) unites them, and that, according to its critics, is a commitment to the ideals of "legal liberalism."