Law’s Evolution and Human Understanding

What a privilege and delight it was to welcome the participants to this conference. I am deeply grateful to the outside commentators, Bill Edmundson, John Finnis, Michael Steven Green, Mark Greenberg, Fred Schauer, and Larry Solum, for contributing so generously. My thanks also go to the many faculty colleagues who joined in the celebration, and particularly to Larry Alexander for convening the event and leading the proceedings, as he so often does, and does so well. This response to the insightful commentaries on Law’s Evolution and Human Understanding grows out of three propositions: law comes first, law is signals, law is of human community.

These propositions underlie the book’s attempt to address “the three recurrent issues” that H.L.A. Hart identified at the heart of debates about the nature of law: law’s relation to morality, law’s relation to force, and the nature of rules.