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Appeals to the public interest in law are commonplace, but typically made without clarifying what the public interest is and how it can be determined. In law, this has led to ad hoc applications of the public interest and, consequently, to "judicial idiosyncrasy," posing a threat to legal certainty. This paper aims to remedy these problems by providing much‐needed conceptual clarification. It proposes that something is in the public interest if it increases the opportunities of the members of the public to pursue and realize the (permissible) ends they all share qua equal members of the public. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When legal theorists ask questions about legal interpretation—such as what it fundamentally is, what it aims at, or how it should work—they often do so in ways closely tethered to existing legal practice. For example: they try to understand how an activity legal actors (purportedly) already engage in should be done better, such as how judges can better learn about the content of the law. In this paper, I discuss a certain kind of "conceptual ethics" approach to thinking about legal interpretation, which is less tethered to existing legal practice (or the existing meaning of core pieces of legal terminology). The approach I explore asks questions about legal interpretation in a way that is tethered to what legal (or "legal‐ish") concepts people should deploy, as part of arguments on behalf of engaging in legal (or "legal‐ish") practices different from our current ones. In exploring this approach, I aim to help us better understand the landscape of philosophical issues about legal interpretation, including parts of it that I think have been underexplored. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Though first proposed more than two decades ago, virtue jurisprudence—broadly, the attempt to apply the insights and perspectives of virtue ethics to law and legal theory—has failed to gain much traction in the legal academy. This is partly due, we suggest, to the dominance of traditionalist neo‐Aristotelian approaches to virtue jurisprudence—most notably in the work of Lawrence Solum, the most prominent theoretical architect and defender of virtue jurisprudence. In this paper, we sketch in broad strokes an alternative form of virtue jurisprudence—a pluralistic virtue‐centered approach—and explain how it might work, particularly in the field of constitutional adjudication. Such an approach, we argue, has major advantages over prevailing neo‐Aristotelian models, and may well have wider appeal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper scrutinizes the notion of the limits of the law by contrasting the narrative of the autonomy and independence of legal systems with the alternative narratives the law itself can acknowledge. If the limits of the law can dwell in this acknowledgment of alternative narratives, such limits will turn out to be neither reassuring borders nor protective walls. In the interstitial spaces between narratives may dwell a notion of limits of the law that probably cannot be captured by any geographic‐border metaphor. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]