A Retreat from Pepper v Hart? A Reply to Lord Steyn

This article shows how the House of Lords has, in recent years,embarked on a retreat from its landmark decision in Pepper vHart which had relaxed the rule prohibiting courts from usingministerial statements made in Parliament for the purpose ofinterpreting statutes. This development was initiated by a lecturegiven by Lord Steyn in May 2000 and subsequently published inthis journal. The article attempts to refute the reasons advancedin support of the retreat. In addition, it sets out to showthat the alternative solution proposed by Lord Steyn createsboth conceptual and practical difficulties. As a result it arguesfor a reversal of the retreat.     

A Political Theory of Blackmail: A Reply to Professor Dripps

This essay was originally presented at the Rutgers Institute for Law and Philosophy as part of the Symposium on The Evolution of Criminal Law Theory. It is a Reply to Professor Donald Dripps’ politically-based justification for blackmail’s prohibition. Under Dripps’ account, by exacting payment from the victim blackmail is an impermissible form of private punishment that usurps the state’s public monopoly on law enforcement. This essay demonstrates that Dripps’ account is either under-inclusive or over-inclusive or both. Dripps’ account is applied to a number of the standard blackmail scenarios by which theories of blackmail are typically assessed. Dripps’ account is under-inclusive by failing to treat as blackmail Victim-Welcomed Blackmail, Non-Monetary Blackmail, Rebuffed Blackmail, and Non-Informational Blackmail which the law considers as blackmail. And it is over-inclusive by treating as blackmail Victim-Initiated Exchange and Unconditional Disclosure which the law does not recognize as blackmail.     

Hart Interviewed: H.L.A. Hart in Conversation with David Sugarman

Within the English-speaking world, H.L.A. Hart (1907–1992) is regarded as the twentieth century's foremost legal philosopher. He revived the moribund discipline of jurisprudence, reorientating it so that the qualities associated with analytical philosophy in the second half of the twentieth century² were applied to the investigation of the most fundamental concepts of law and to major public issues, notably, the complex relation between law and morality. As a colleague, teacher, mentor, and author, he exercised a profound influence, an influence that extended to the 'real world' and 'real issues'. From the late 1950s onwards, he championed a new humaneness in punishment, speaking and writing for a right to abortion and against the death penalty and the prosecution of people because of their sexual preferences. His exploration of the balance between the modern welfare state and individual liberty - in particular, the legitimate use of state power to impose standards of private morality -produced an eloquent and highly influential manifesto for modern political liberalism. As Tony Honore, his close colleague at Oxford, put it,'He was the most widely read British legal philosopher of the twentieth century and his work will continue to be a focus of discussion.³     

Lesser-Evil Justifications: A Reply to Frowe

Sometimes one can prevent harm only by contravening rights. If the harm one can prevent is great enough, compared to the stringency of the opposing rights, then one has a lesser-evil justification to contravene the rights. Non-consequentialist orthodoxy holds that, most of the time, lesser-evil justifications add to agents’ permissible options without taking any away. Helen Frowe rejects this view. She claims that, almost always, agents must act on their lesser-evil justifications. Our primary task is to refute Frowe’s flagship argument. Secondarily, it is to sketch a positive case for nonconsequentialist orthodoxy.