A Critical Legal Studies Perspective

In this comment I want to address two points suggested by Professor Finnis's essay "Natural Law and Legal Reasoning." I say "suggested by" deliberately, for I do not want to attribute the points in their full force to him, although I believe that his essay lends itself to a reading in which those points would be given their full force. The points deal with the question of "easy questions" and what Professor Finnis calls the "sufficient and necessarily artificial clarity and definiteness" that yields answers to such questions, and with the way in which legal professionals are likely to understand the "theory of practical reasoning" to which Professor Finnis is committed. In discussing these points I will move back and forth between what I have elsewhere called the sociological and the philosophical strands in critical legal studies. At the conclusion of the comment I will note briefly some of my disquiets about the enterprise of the comment itself.