Postscript on Theoretical Disagreements

Abstract A number of recent legal philosophers (Luka Burazin and Giovanni Battista Ratti, Torben Spaak, Bill Watson, Aaron Graham, and Richard Stillman) have proposed an alternative within a positivist framework to my “error theoretic” account. The animating idea of most of these accounts (with some subtle variations I discuss) is that it suffices for legal positivism that lawyers and judges agree on the valid sources of law, even if they disagree about how to interpret those sources. I argue against these approaches on the general ground that without resolving some questions about the meaning of the sources, the rule of recognition cannot discharge its basic epistemic function.