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Scott Hershovitz, Law is a Moral Practice, Harvard University Press, 2023, 236pp., $39.95 (hbk), ISBN 9780674258556.
Reviewed by Brian Leiter, University of Chicago
In the first chapter of his often entertaining but rather exasperating book, Scott Hershovitz gives two different formulations of its central thesis that “law is a moral practice.” In one formulation, “legal practices—like legislation and adjudication—are the sorts of activities that might, in the right circumstances, rearrange people’s moral relationships. That is what I mean when I say that law is a moral practice” (28, emphasis added; cf. 132). This view, however, is trivially true: all kinds of practices (not just legal ones) “might, in the right circumstances” change our moral relationships with each other. (If my neighbor regularly leaves garbage on my lawn, this will change our moral relationship, e.g., I will be morally justified in bringing a civil action against him, and I…
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