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The Practice of Principle: In Defence of a Pragmatist Approach to Legal Theory. By Jules L. Coleman.* Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. Pp. 226. $39.95.
Jules Coleman is an exceptionally distinguished legal theorist who has made significant contributions to many different fields in legal and political philosophy, but he is particularly well known for his work in tort theory and in jurisprudence. In tort theory, he has offered a powerful and sustained defense of the view that tort law is best understood by reference to the principle of corrective justice.1 In jurisprudence, he is one of the two most prominent contemporary legal positivists-the other is Joseph Raz-and also the leading proponent of the view that has come to be known as inclusive legal positivism.2 That view holds that while a particular legal system's criteria of legality-the criteria that determine which norms are to count in the system as legal norms-must be grounded in a social convention of a certain kind, the criteria themselves need not refer exclusively to social sources; contrary to what Raz has argued, the sources of law can also be moral in character.
In his important new book The Practice of Principle,3 Coleman further develops and deepens his views in both tort theory and jurisprudence. The versions of those views that he presents in the book are substantively appealing and often persuasive. Although torts and jurisprudence might appear to be not particularly closely related fields of theoretical inquiry, Coleman provides a unifying theme through his discussions of methodology. His sophisticated examination of methodological issues is one of the most rewarding aspects of a rich and rewarding book. Coleman presents his theory of corrective justice as an application of a more general method of theorizing about particular areas of substantive law, which he calls pragmatic conceptual analysis. The hallmark of this approach is the attempt to discover the principles that are embodied in a given area of the law, without concern for the moral appeal of those principles. So far as jurisprudence is concerned, Coleman argues that while the defense of jurisprudential theories necessarily relies on epistemic norms, it does not require appeal to moral or political considerations.
The methodology that is involved in studying tort law and other discrete areas of the...