Putting law in its place

Speaker: Professor Lawrence Sager (The University of Texas at Austin)
Chair: Professor Cécile Laborde FBA (UCL Political Science)
Series: Institute of Law, Politics and Philosophy

About the Institute

This lecture is the launch of the new UCL Institute of Laws, Politics and Philosophy (ILPP).

The Institute brings together political and legal theorists from Law, Political Science and Philosophyand organises regular colloquia in terms 2 and 3.About the lecture:

About the lecture

Ronald Dworkin will be best remembered for his legal philosophy.  But in Justice for Hedgehogs law comes late and very little is said.  To a large extent, Dworkin incorporates his earlier work by reference.  But he does focus at some length on what he calls the “one system” approach to the question of the relationship between law and morality.  In the one system approach, law is morality… more exactly, law is a branch of political morality.

The one system view refutes the idea that there can be valid propositions of law that are not properly enforceable by courts.  I have long insisted that there are such propositions and that their underenforcement by the judiciary does not undermine their status as law.  Dworkin and I have gone back and forth about this; I am deeply sorry that I will have the last word in our exchange

About the speaker

Lawrence Sager is the Alice Jane Drysdale Sheffield Regents Chair of Law, and former Dean of the Law School at the University of Texas.

Sager previously taught at the New York University School of Law, where he joined Ronald Dworkin and Thomas Nagel as co-founder of the Program in Law, Philosophy and Social Theory.  He has also taught at UCLA, Harvard, Princeton, Boston University and the University of Michigan.

His work on constitutional theory introduced the idea of judicial underenforcement, which figures in Putting Law in Its Place.  Religious Freedom has been a focus of much of his recent work.

Along with his co-author Christopher Eisgruber, Sager has argued for a liberal egalitarian approach to this topic, and has succeeded in putting that approach firmly on the conceptual agenda.  Sager has also co-authored with Lewis Kornhauser, and, with Kornhauser, is credited with the discovery and exploration of the Doctrinal Paradox.

Sager is the author of two books: Justice in Plainclothes: a Theory of American Constitutional Practice(Yale Univ. Press), and Religious Freedom and the Constitution (co-authored with Christopher Eisgruber) (Harvard Univ. Press).