Law's Empire [antikvár]

. PREFACE .We live in and by the law. It makes us what we are: citizens and employees and doctors and spouses and people who own things. It is sword, shield, and menace: we insist on our wage, or refuse to pay our rent, or are forced to forfeit penalties, or are closed up in jail, all in the name of what our abstract and ethereal sovereign, the law, has decreed. And we argue about what it has decreed, even when the books that are supposed to record its commands and directions are silent; we act then as if law had muttered its doom, too low to be heard distinctly. We are subjects of law's empire, liegemen to its methods and ideals, bound in spirit while we debate what we must therefore do.What sense does this make? How can the law command when the law books are silent or unclear^^ambigupus? This book sets out in full-length form an answer I have been developing piecemeal, in fits and starts, for severa] years: that Tegal reasoning is an exercise in constructive interpretation, that our law consists in the best justification of our legal practices as a whole, that it consists in the narrative story, that makes of these practices the best they can be. The distinctive structure and constraints of legal argument emerge, on this view, only when we identify and distinguish the diverse and often competitive dimensions of political value, the different strands woven together in the complex judgment that one interpretation makes law's story better on the whole, all things considered, than any other can. This book refines and expands and illustrates that conception of law.Tt