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The Journal of Contemporary Legal Issues

Larry Alexander

Abstract

In this Article, I am going to focus on a set of issues that follow from the fact that laws are created by human beings and interpreted by human beings. It is unlike morality in these respects. For morality presumably applies to us humans, whether we accept what it requires or correctly assess what it requires. But it is we who decide what laws, good or bad, should govern us, and whose interpretations of those laws, correct or incorrect, should constitute our governing laws. And if the uncertainty of what morality requires creates the necessity for laws, and if laws, to fulfill this moral need, must be simpler and thus easier for us humans to grasp than what morality dictates, then law and morality will inevitably conflict. And that means that conflicts between what the law requires and what each of us believes morality requires will be inevitable—even in the best legal systems we humans, with our limitations, can construct.

In this Article, I will focus both on interpretation of the law and on law’s paradoxical moral status as something morally required but inevitably at least partially morally incorrect. I turn first to legal interpretation.

This paper is part of a Symposium on “Free Speech Beyond The Constitution” published in 27 Journal of Contemporary Legal Issues (2025).

Volume

27

Issue

1

Start Page

203

Faculty Editor

Maimon Schwarzschild & Larry Alexander

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