In Defense of the Standard Picture: Overcoming Death by a Thousand Cuts

In a previous article, I defended the standard picture of law (or SP), so labeled by its foremost critic, Mark Greenberg. In that article, I addressed Greenberg's root-and-branch critique of the SP and, to a much lesser extent, a related critique by Scott Hershovitz. But the Greenberg and Hershovitz frontal attacks on the SP are not its only threats. Some theorists, while not attacking the SP directly, give accounts of law that the SP cannot accommodate. Those theorists will be challenged here, because if they are correct, the SP is not a tenable account of law.