A wonderful visit to Cornell Law School

I had the honor today of giving the 2010 Frank Irvine Lecture at Cornell Law School.  What a pleasure it was to meet in person my MoJ brothers Eduardo Penalver, Bob Hockett, and Steve Shiffrin.  They were exceptionally gracious hosts.  It was also a pleasure to meet their distinguished colleague in jurisprudence Robert Summers---a scholar from whose writings I have learned a great deal.  Over the years, Professor Summers has spent a lot of time in Oxford---where I did my doctorate under Joseph Raz and John Finnis---and he had many marvelous stories of the great figures in Oxford philosophy, including H.L.A. Hart, under whom Professors Raz and Finnis did their doctorates,  Yet another pleasure was reconnecting with Stewart Schwab, the Dean of the Law School, with whom I attended college at Swarthmore.  My lecture, entitled "Modern Legal Philosophy," was much too long, but members of the audience that assembled in the Moot Courtroom were exemplary in their patience.  Here is my opening paragraph:

Although I confess to having chosen my title for today with a view to taking advantage of the resonances it would suggest with Elizabeth Anscombe’s famous paper, my purpose is distinctly different from hers. In “Modern Moral Philosophy,” Anscombe lamented the state of the discipline and sought (with some success, as things turned out) to redirect it to its Aristotelian roots.  Modern legal philosophy, as I see it, began badly—precisely because it incorporated some of the key defects in the understanding of practical reasoning that Anscombe identified as afflicting moral philosophy in its then dominant forms.  But Anglo-American analytic jurisprudence has in the past sixty years largely overcome these defects and gotten itself on track.  An assessment of the condition of modern legal philosophy need not be a lament, nor (I’m glad to say) need the assessor adopt the stance of a prophet recalling the wayward from the path of perdition.