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Legal Theory, Law, and Politics: Making Theory Useful

Jun 2, 2026 Abdurrahman AtçilLegal History

Allan C. Hutchinson, Hart, Fuller, and Everything After: The Politics of Legal Theory (2023).

In his famous 1957 Oliver Wendell Holmes Lecture at Harvard, the renowned British legal philosopher H. L. A. Hart presented a vision of law as a system of rules validated through institutional procedures and not dependent on moral merit for their validity. Later that year, his American colleague Lon Fuller countered that only an “inner morality” imbues law with its binding force; normative statements lacking moral merit do not qualify as law. This debate, states Allan C. Hutchinson in Hart, Fuller, and Everything After, defined the agenda of Anglo-American jurisprudence for decades afterward; but, closely bound up with the historical and intellectual conditions of its day, he argues, it offers a poor framework for discussing the diversity of legal practices beyond the postwar liberal societies of Britain and the United States. As an historian of Ottoman law, I’m inclined to agree.

One of the great challenges that historians in fields like mine face is the difficulty of connecting the literature on modern legal theory with the normative worlds of societies far different from the ones that figures like Hart and Fuller addressed. By unpacking the seemingly timeless questions at the center of the Hart–Fuller debate, Hutchinson instead presents law as an ongoing social activity shaped by interpretation, institutional practices, and political and moral struggles. In doing so, he makes legal theory speak to these other worlds, and thereby makes it more useful for a much broader audience. Continue reading "Legal Theory, Law, and Politics: Making Theory Useful"

Who Wants What?

Jun 1, 2026 Albertina AntogniniFamily Law

John Morley & Yair Listokin, What Should You Owe Your Ex? A Survey of Attitudes About the Law of Married and Cohabiting Relationships (Mar. 14, 2026) (unpublished manuscript), available at SSRN.

Albertina Antognini

Law has mostly dealt with unmarried couples by adopting a wait-and-see approach. Rather than states passing legislation ex ante, courts address issues that arise ex post. Among the most commonly litigated questions is property ownership – where courts are asked to sort out who owns what and who owes what to whom. While much scholarship has considered how law should distribute such property, there is precious little information on what cohabitants themselves want. John Morley and Yair Listokin’s article, What Should You Owe Your Ex? A Survey of Attitudes About the Law of Married and Cohabiting Relationships, provides a timely and important intervention, offering an empirical assessment of what cohabiting couples, as compared to married couples, desire when their relationship ends.

Morley and Listokin thus seek to fill a gap not primarily in law (although that too), but in knowledge: “We bring these wishes into focus by directly asking people in a systematic way for the first time what they want for themselves.” (P. 37.) To do so, they surveyed a nationally representative sample of around 3,000 American adults, half of whom were married and half of whom lived with a partner in a nonmarital relationship. Continue reading "Who Wants What?"