THE CONSTITUTION OF LAW Part 2 docx

10 introduction

the language of competing supremacies and so I will support a conception

of the powers of government which is divided more by function than by

areas of exclusive power or jurisdiction.

A further foil for my argument is legal positivism, which manifests

itself in a family of loosely connected positions: the conceptual version

which argues on theoretical grounds that there is no necessary connec￾tion between law and morality, or as I prefer to put it, between legality

and legitimacy; political positivism, the Benthamite and neo-Benthamite

positions which argue on political grounds for an understanding of law

which will maintain the legislature’s supremacy over judges; constitu￾tional positivism, the version developed by judges who work within a

common law legal order which they make sense of in accordance with the

rigid doctrine of the separation of powers; and, finally, functionalism, a

theory of the administrative state that seeks to tame the judiciary in order

to facilitate the work of public officials.

Finally, I will set out a conception of the judicial role that is rather

different from Dworkin’s Herculean one, where judge Hercules is regarded

as the guardian of the abstract principle of equal concern and respect.

Rather than looking to such abstract principles of political philosophy, I

will argue that we should look to the principles of the rule of law or legality

which are by way of being structural principles of the integrity of legal

order. Here I will rely on Lon L. Fuller’s idea that legal order must aspire

to realize principles of an ‘inner morality of law’.11 It is such principles

which provide us ultimately with the basis for understanding how judges

should approach the cases discussed in this book. They can rightly be seen

as mediating between liberalism as an abstract political doctrine and an

account of how judges are to decide cases in which the rule of law is at

issue. Certainly, when there is compliance with the principles, the results

will be consistent with liberalism’s concern for the rights of the individual

and their inclusion into an account of judicial duty is not hostile to the

spirit of Dworkin’s approach.12

However, as already indicated, the realization of the principles of the

rule of law is as dependent, if not more, on legislative and executive

11 Fuller, Morality of Law. 12 Indeed, in more recent work Dworkin has come to rely more on the idea of legality as

an organizing principle of legal order: see Ronald Dworkin, ‘Hart’s Postscript and the

Character of Political Philosophy’ (2004) 24 Oxford Journal of Legal Studies 1–37. He

has also suggested that judges need not be the only site for the moral elaboration of the

requirements of law: Ronald Dworkin, Freedom’s Law: The Moral Reading of the American

Constitution (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996), pp. 33–4.

introduction 11

commitment as it is on judicial guardianship. I will show that the com￾monality of the rule-of-law project requires that judges adopt an appro￾priate stance of deference not only to their legislatures, but also, and more

controversially, to the executive, even when the executive is engaged in

interpretation of the most fundamental legal values. Further, that same

project raises questions about the most effective institutional arrange￾ments for implementing the rule of law – and answers to such questions

might well require imaginative experiments in institutional design which

only the legislature and the executive can undertake, and in which it might

be appropriate that judges have only a marginal role.

Thus, even though judges play an essential role in my argument, they

will also be somewhat demoted from the supreme position they are some￾times accorded in legal theory. Nevertheless, even if judges cannot under￾take the institutional experiments in which I think the legislature and the

executive must engage in order to support the rule-of-law project, and

even though once these experiments are under way, judges might play

only a marginal role in them, judges still retain a central role in prompt￾ing the legislature and the executive to undertake the experiments. For the

moment, at least, judicial reasoning remains the main site for articulating

the principles of the rule-of-law project.

My conception of the judicial role is thus neither of the two versions

offered by legal positivism: the judge as the mouth through which the law

(understood as the determinate content of rules) speaks; nor the judge as

a mini-legislature, who has to make law because rules do not dictate an

answer. Nor, as I have already suggested, is it only the judge as Hercules.

Rather, it includes the judge as weatherman, an idea partly inspired by

Bob Dylan, though, contrary to his claim, I think that one needs a weath￾erman to know which way the wind blows.13 But mostly the image comes

from Thomas Hobbes and from the most famous chapter in his work,

chapter 13 of Leviathan,

14 where Hobbes sets out the state of nature.

Everyone remembers that Hobbes defines the state of nature as a ‘warre,

as of every man, against every man’.15 But not everyone recalls that Hobbes

also says that the war he has in mind need not be actual fighting, but the

‘known disposition thereto’, just as the ‘nature of Foule weather, lyeth not

in a showre or two of rain; but in an inclination thereto of many days

13 See ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues’. First release, ‘Bringing it All Back Home’. 14 Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan; edited by Richard Tuck (Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press, 1996). 15 Ibid., ch. 13, p. 88.