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Post-Merits Stare Decisis

May 29, 2026 Nina VarsavaAdd a Comment

In Sustaining Stare Decisis as a Post-Merits Determination, Peter Povilonis offers an insightful and novel analysis of the U.S. Supreme Court’s stare decisis jurisprudence. He characterizes stare decisis as a procedural doctrine that, in its proper form, is separate from merits determinations. Just as some doctrines, including statutes of limitations and jurisdiction, are pre-merits matters, stare decisis, Povilonis argues, is meant to be a purely post-merits analysis.

This means that, in the horizontal context, stare decisis has effect if and only if the Court first determines that the precedent at issue is erroneous (or assumes for the sake of argument that it is erroneous, e.g., because the Justices disagree about that): the analysis “comes subsequent to a determination on the merits” (P. 671). The important upshot is that, once the Court makes the merits determination and moves on to the stare decisis inquiry, it can’t go back to re-assess the merits or improve the holding of the precedent. That, argues Povilonis, would be inconsistent with the post-merits methodology of stare decisis.

Why should we insist that stare decisis be implemented in a post-merits way? Povilonis argues that otherwise the doctrine would fail to serve its purpose, which, broadly put, is to serve values related to stability and efficiency. If the Court “upholds” a precedent only to revise the precedent’s reasoning, subsequent courts will have to figure out what the original precedent has come to mean, given the more recent decision.

This is exactly what has happened, explains Povilonis, in the wake of Kisor v. Wilkie (2019), where the Supreme Court proclaimed that it was upholding Auer v. Robbins (1997) and related cases while substantially altering the rule of deference to agency interpretations of regulations that those precedents stood for. This has resulted in confusion in the lower courts and even a circuit split about the meaning of Auer in light of Kisor. “The problem,” says Povilonis, “is that the Court engaged in a merits-based correction when deciding a post-merits question. This implementation of stare decisis in name only has created uncertainty about whether the aspects of the old doctrine now limited by Kisor’s new rule—like deference to unambiguous regulations—are still good law” (P. 683).

Povilonis’s view seems to assume that a decision either upholds the precedent at issue and we get the policy benefits of stare decisis, or the decision overrules the precedent and we get none of those benefits. The Court has to choose between issuing “a better legal rule but sacrificing other policy interests,” says Povilonis, or “uphold[ing] the case, obtaining the policy justifications but affirming an erroneous legal rule. The Court cannot have it both ways” (P. 693). I’m not sure about that. Even if a decision is based on substantially different reasoning from a precedent, it might maintain some consistency with the precedent and serve the stare decisis values to some extent. Further, I’m not sure that the Court is always in the best position to ascertain the extent to which it is overruling a precedent. That might be best worked out by lower courts as they encounter new facts.

For example, Povilonis invites us to imagine that, in Dobbs,

Instead of overruling Roe v. Wade, the Court claimed to uphold Roe. Yet, while ‘upholding,’ imagine the Court nevertheless laid out a new test which allowed for states to ban abortions [after] 15 weeks. Would Roe have truly been upheld? This example is not so imaginary, as it resembles the approach of a concurring opinion. See Dobbs, 597 U.S. at 352. (Roberts, C.J., concurring) (arguing that a state law prohibiting abortions [after] 15 weeks should be constitutional without having to overrule Roe). (P. 686, n.201.)

I’m not convinced that Justice Roberts’s position is untenable, nor that his opinion isn’t better for stare decisis reasons than the majority’s in Dobbs. It’s not implausible to think that an important part of the Roe/Casey holding involved protection of a meaningful opportunity to choose to have an abortion. And, as Roberts noted, if people were relying on those decisions, what they were relying on was that kind of protection—i.e., of a meaningful opportunity obtain an abortion—and not the specific details of the trimester framework or undue burden standard, technicalities with which few non-legal experts would have been familiar. Further, we can imagine a decision that upheld the abortion precedents but on entirely different grounds—for example, of equal protection rather than substantive due process. A decision like that, it seems to me, would have served some of the stare decisis values. Casey itself substantially revised Roe’s reasoning and holding, and yet I don’t think that decision completely undermined the purposes of stare decisis. It seems that Casey did protect reliance interests, certainly more so than a decision like Dobbs.

In any event, Sustaining Stare Decisis as a Post-Merits Determination is a welcome contribution to the literature on adjudication, legal reasoning, and the Supreme Court, bringing clarity to the fraught and often confusing practice of stare decisis. I think an important lesson to be taken from the article is that we should not take the Court at its word regarding whether it’s overruling a precedent; as Povilonis nicely illustrates, the Court sometimes effectively overrules a decision not merely without saying so, but even while insisting that it is upholding it. I would add that, likewise, perhaps sometimes the Court proclaims to overrule a decision when it really doesn’t have the power to do so, because the question before it is narrower. Just as we shouldn’t take it for granted that the Court is exercising as little law-changing power as it purports to, we should question whether the Court is exercising as much law-changing power as it purports to.

The Object of Legal Interpretation

May 1, 2026 Carlos BernalAdd a Comment

In The Object of Interpretation, Professor Urbina offers a comprehensive exploration of this topic. He addresses the nature of the object of interpretation, the different senses of the term “object of interpretation”, the alternative candidates for objects of interpretation, and how to determine which should be the object in practice. The paper claims that there is no single correct object of legal interpretation. Text, lawmaking choice, practice, and order are suitable candidates. None of them are necessary objects of interpretation. Ultimately, the object of interpretation is what is treated as a precise source of law, namely, facts that are recognized as generating law. Which candidate is the object of interpretation in any given context is contingent on descriptive considerations on what is regularly treated as a legal source in that legal system and on normative considerations on what officials should treat as a legal source. In this sense, officials cannot presuppose what the object of interpretation is. They should ground what that object should be. Furthermore, in many instances, the object of interpretation is legally unsettled. When this is the case, legal interpreters must exercise discretion in choosing an object of interpretation. But they must also deliberate morally about whether to follow a legal settlement when there is one, and about which settlement they will help bring about when one is needed. Hence, the “‘correct’ object of interpretation is, then, a function of positive law and moral judgment”.

For his analysis, Professor Urbina understands a legal source as a “thing that contains or generates legal norms”, and legal interpretation as the activity of determining what legal norms are generated by legal sources. According to his point of view, a legal source is a fact that generates legal norms that either (i) has been issued according to the rules of the legal system; or (ii) that has been recognized as a legal source in legal practice by officials. In any of these cases, the legal system could recognize a source more or less “precisely”. Thus, it could recognize, for example, “What the Queen in Parliament enacts” as law or “The text that the Queen in Parliament enacts” as law. The latter recognition is at the level of precision of the object of interpretation. Thus, the law here settles the object of interpretation by sanctioning one of the possible alternatives. These two features can break a possible circularity problem, namely, that a legal source is a fact that can generate legal norms, and, at the same time, a legal norm is a determination grounded in a legal source.

Moreover, Professor Urbina conceptualizes the task of “determining the object of interpretation”. From his perspective, this task is twofold, namely, it requires attending to the legal sources that are recognized as law in a legal system and to practical reasons bearing on an interpreter’s choice of an approach to interpretation. Even when a legal system settles on an object of interpretation (“the text that the Queen in Parliament…”), individual legal interpreters still face a choice of either going along with this legal settlement or not. The law may provide a reason for the choice of object, but it need not be a conclusive one. In turn, the choices of legal interpreters may alter the legal settlement, and thus, through individual interpretations, the legal system may settle on a different object of interpretation—or on none. Thus, one can think of the “correct” object of interpretation in three—equally valid—senses. First, as legal correctness, that is, as what “corresponds to either what the legal system recognizes as a source of law in that legal system or is mandated by a legal rule”. Second, as practical and individual correctness. This is about what an interpreter should treat as the object of interpretation, and it depends on “the moral and prudential reasons bearing on that choice”. Third, as practical and systemic correctness, namely, what a legal system should recognize as a precise source of law, thus settling on an alternative on the object of interpretation.

Prof. Urbina’s contribution to the topic is both highly original and illuminating. It also opens a big field for future interpretation. How should officials undertake a process of choosing the object of interpretation? Should they always begin with the socially recognized text and then assess the relevance of lawmaking choice, practice, and order? Or should they proceed the other way around? Namely, should they begin with interpreting the practice, then order, lawmaking choices, and finally, the text? Furthermore, how to articulate descriptive and normative reasons? In case of conflict, what sort of reasons should prevail? Should officials operate with normative reasons in all cases or in cases of open-textured texts? All these questions can lead to deconstructing the field of choosing the object of interpretation to an uncharted territory of topoi. The value of Prof. Ubina’s article is to highlight the complexity of choosing the object of interpretation that, in the work of many other authors, remains hidden.

Modern Analytical Jurisprudence

Apr 3, 2026 Sean Coyle1 comment

The Nature of Law is an insightful and engaging book that challenges almost every touchstone of modern jurisprudence. Proceeding from the thesis that laws must be understood after all as commands rather than rules, the book defends the thesis that law itself must be understood by reference to the common good. The view that the law consists of commands does not take us back to the Austinian jurisprudence that preceded H. L. A. Hart’s (the author maintains that John Austin’s theory is indeed radically defective), but challenges the modern consensus that Hart’s conception of law as a system of rules is really the advance it is supposed to be.

The book’s central sections deal with the question of whether there is an obligation to obey the law, not (as Joseph Raz maintains) merely because the law consists of reasons for action that apply to the subject anyway (P. 199), but because the law secures the common good in ways that cannot be successfully contemplated or advanced by multitudes of individuals, even if those individuals steadily wish to act for the common good. This thesis is linked to that of command, for the author argues that commands generate genuine obligations, and do not simply, as Hart suggested, oblige (Pp. 93-96, 204). In fact, it is Hart who runs into trouble, for his argument is based on the idea that rules are to be theorised as practices, but these can be shown to lack a normative element.

Here, the author seems to run aground, for Hart in this sense follows the lead of Aristotle and Aquinas, in supposing that a function of law is to coerce un-virtuous people to act virtuously until they come to love virtue and act for its sake. The un-virtuous can be described as engaging in a practice, yet continue in that practice only in order to avoid punishment, or merely ‘conform’, and not because they have ‘internalised’ the values that structure the practice. But practices can be moral, too: the virtuous also engage in a practice (in extensional terms, the very same practice as that of the un-virtuous), but they do so because they deem the practice to be good, even if only good on the whole. Furthermore, is not ‘acceptance’ normative? (P. 62.) Whatever the relative merits of commands vs. rules, the central thesis of the book is, to repeat, that law in the proper sense is orientated to the common good. Individual laws that do not serve the common good “remain law, but [weigh] down the system and potentially erode its legitimacy” (P. 15). It is unfortunate that the book does not offer a finely calibrated account as to the various ways in which a legal rule erodes the legitimacy of the system, the significance of these, and at what point legitimacy disappears under the weight of evil laws. The only worked-out example given is that of Nazi law, which is well-trodden and too well-known to offer any substantial new insights (P. 140).

Having progressed from the controversy of commands vs. rules, the central chapters of the book concern justification (Ch 3) and authority (Ch 4). Both of these chapters critically discuss Raz’s jurisprudence, challenging his ‘service’ conception of authority. Chapter 4, which is the longest in the book at over 90 pages (Pp. 185-278), is the one about which I have least to say. It is somewhat repetitious and too long for even the most eager reader to maintain focus. But one thesis did stand out. The author asserts, like John Finnis and Robert George, that the law, in seeking the common good, consists in settling coordination problems (P. 196). This established thesis should be given up. For the foundational projects of the law in fact pertain to justice (e.g., in accidental and intentional harms, in transactions and rights of ownership) and in fairness (procedures and due process, delegated authority and legislation, and so on), and neither of these projects essentially aims at coordination.

There is much else in the book that is of interest, but I have confined myself here to what is most original in the author’s argument. I want to close this review by picking out a single sentence that has, in fact, great significance for the author’s project, implying as it does a methodological assumption. Stating that we need an account of why particular standards count as law, he asserts: ‘Any analysis requires a unitary definition at some stage’ (P. 131). Such a viewpoint, which drives many legal theories and not just the author’s, could itself be challenged on the ground that the concept of ‘law’ is one structured by family resemblance at most, there not being a single archetype or shining example against which all legal systems or practices are judged (for indeed we can ponder whether all law-practices are systematic above and beyond being consistent). The very idea that a unitary definition is possible in legal theory is one that should not be automatically assumed.

In conclusion, there is much of interest in this book, to agree with or dispute. It is a testament to the book’s originality that either of these eventualities will be extremely profitable.

What is Real Law?

Mar 4, 2026 Izabela Skoczen3 comments

In the article, Lawful, But Not Really: The Dual Character of The Concept of Law, Brian Flanagan and Guilherme de Almeida challenge the traditional divides in jurisprudence as to the definitions of the concept of law as well as the concept of legal validity. The article intends to offer a novel, third-way approach between the two traditionally most populated camps in legal philosophy, namely positivism and natural law theory.

The novelty of the article does not consist only in its theoretical appeal, but also in adopting a relatively new methodology, namely the methodology of experimental jurisprudence (“xjur”). Xjur seeks to shed new light on traditional jurisprudential questions by employing the methodology of the psychological, sociological, or cognitive sciences. The methods include, among others, massive online surveys, corpus studies (analyzing a large collection of texts), neuroimaging, or decision-making in immersive virtual reality. Using these methods permits researchers to achieve a more accurate grasp of how people understand concepts such as, for example, intention, causation, rule, law, or reasonableness. Moreover, using such methods permits us to end speculation as to, for example, what the linguistic or conceptual intuition of a certain population is. See SEP entry on experimental jurisprudence.

The Authors employ the methodology of massive online surveys in a very rigorous way. They first preregistered their hypotheses, which consist of placing these hypotheses on an online platform that makes it impossible to alter them after running the experiments. The Authors performed a series of attention and comprehension checks, ensured that no participant would take the study twice, and that participants would be native speakers of the language of the survey.

Flanagan and Almeida argue that the concept of law is a dual character concept. But what is a dual character concept? Imagine that someone paints with a brush on canvas an incredibly kitsch landscape. There is a shallow, superficial sense in which it is art, as it is a painting. However, since the painting is empty and does not convey much of a message, one could say that it is not really, or truly, art in a deeper sense. By contrast, think of conceptual art – it may not be a painting on canvas, but it might convey a very powerful message. Thus, one could say that there is a superficial sense in which it is not art, yet in a deeper sense, this is truly art.

Analogously, think of the concept of a scientist: if someone performs a lot of experiments, yet has no curiosity or interest in the truth, are they a true scientist? Or only a scientist in a superficial or shallow sense? By contrast, think of a person who never performed any experiments, but has some innate, avid curiosity for the world. There is a sense in which this person is not a scientist, yet there is also a sense in which this person is a true scientist.¹

Flanagan and Almeida argue that the concept of law also has a dual character, just like the concept of art or the concept of a scientist. For example, imagine that a legislature enacts an incredibly unjust and immoral statute that enables slavery. You could say that there is a shallow sense in which this is a law as it was enacted by a legislature, but it is not a real or true law, because it is so immoral. Conversely, if slavery was never banned in a country, one could say that there is no law against slavery in a superficial sense, but slavery is not really or truly lawful.

The general idea is that certain concepts have two sets of application criteria. First, some descriptive, superficial criteria of application and, second, some normative or deep criteria. Flanagan and Almeida argue that, for the concept of law and the concept of legal validity, the superficial criteria could be, for instance, enactment by a legislature, while the deep criteria may be certain values, rights, or morality, be it substantive or procedural.

Such a manner of conceptualizing law presents a third way between the two biggest traditional jurisprudential camps of defining the concept of law, namely positivism and natural law. There are many varieties of positivism; however, roughly speaking, a positivist would claim that there is no necessary connection between law and moral value. Thus, a law in a superficial sense, but not in a deep sense, may be a valid law (though Hart acknowledged the need for a minimum necessary moral content of law; on the blurred divide between positivism and natural law theory, see footnote reference).² Conversely, a law not in the superficial but in the deep sense may not necessarily be a valid law.

By contrast, the proponents of natural theory doctrines would, roughly speaking, claim the opposite: a law in a shallow sense, but not in a deep sense, is not a law, while a law in a deep sense, but not in a shallow sense, may well be a valid law. This is a much simplified picture; I refer the reader to Flanagan and Almeida’s excellent paper for more nuance on the different stances on the concept of law. The Authors also discuss different candidates for the values underlying a dual character concept of law, one of them being Fullerian procedural morality.

The central question that remains is whether this stance is shared by the wider population, or is it just philosophical speculation? Flanagan and Almeida perform two preregistered experiments, arguing that the dual character intuition is indeed shared by a substantial part of the population. They tested scenarios in which a ban on a morally neutral or immoral behavior was either lifted or the behavior was never banned. In such cases, people tend to agree with the statement that “there is a sense in which [conduct-type] is clearly lawful, but ultimately, if you think about what it really means to be lawful, you would have to say that [conduct-type] is not lawful at all.” Check out their paper for more riveting details on the concept of legal validity!

Theorizing for Insiders and Outsiders

Feb 2, 2026 Brian BixAdd a Comment

Gregory Klass’s article, What Might Contract Theory Be?, was published in the collection, Understanding Private Law, a volume honoring Stephen A. Smith, the eminent Contract and Private Law Theory scholar who passed away far too young (shortly before this volume’s publication). Klass’s article focuses on an influential discussion in the first chapter of Smith’s influential work, Contract Theory.³ In that chapter, Smith sets out the criteria he believes should be used to evaluate theories of contract law. In particular, Smith offers four criteria: fit, coherence, morality, and transparency.⁴ In Klass’s discussion, he asks good, probing questions of each of Smith’s categories and the way that Smith applies them. (Pp. 183-89.) However, Klass’s most important challenge may be the following, general one: should a theorist of contract law (or other doctrinal areas of law) be essentially an outside spectator to the practice, or essentially a (kind of) participant in the practice?

Whether theorists should be (or should treat themselves as being) participants or observers has been an active dispute for some time in the related area of general theories about the nature of law. Many of the best-known theories of law take primarily an observer’s attitude towards the subject – law, legal norms, the legal system. At the same time, at least since the work of H. L. A. Hart, they have simultaneously given significance to the “internal point of view,” the fact that some of those in the practice accept the law (as giving them reasons for action).⁵ By contrast, Ronald Dworkin presented a theory of law, and an approach to theorizing about law, in which the theorist is a participant in the practice, and “no firm line divides jurisprudence from adjudication or any other aspect of legal practice.”⁶ Hart’s response to Dworkin on this matter was simple: that whatever value there might be to a theory built entirely from an insider’s perspective, “there is an important place for general and descriptive jurisprudence”.⁷

As Klass reports, Smith, in Contract Theory, takes Hart’s position for contract law theory: endorsing incorporating the internal point of view (P. 182),⁸ but combining this with a participant’s perspective. By way of critique, Klass argues that, at least for common law jurisdictions (like the United States), where judges have both the authority and the responsibility to alter and improve the law while resolving individual disputes, the theorist should take the participant’s perspective, not a spectator’s perspective. (P. 190.)⁹ The judge and the lawyer considering a question of contract law – in particular, if it is a question of first impression or if there is a reasonable argument for revising existing law – will argue in terms of a “rational reconstruction” of precedent. Rational reconstruction takes the prior decisions and re-characterizes them in a way that makes them as good as they can be relative to the justifications of that area of law, or relative to the justifications for law generally. Such rational reconstruction, it can be seen, requires, or at least benefits from, the sort of resources one could find in a theory of contract law: views about the overall objectives of contract law as well as the intermediate-level objectives of various contract law doctrines and principles. So the theorist of contract law effectively is doing the same thing as the advocate or the judge: “participa[ting] in the shared project of using available materials to achieve the best possible law of contract”. (P. 191.)

How we should best understand and evaluate theories of doctrinal areas of law remains an underdeveloped area of legal philosophy. Stephen Smith offered an important early analysis, and Gregory Klass has now contributed valuable refinements to Smith’s views. But Klass’s article also raises new questions. For example, if Klass’s argument is tied to the nature of common law decision-making, does that mean that one might (should) have an entirely different theory of contract law for civil law legal systems?

What is “Naturalized Jurisprudence”?

Jan 4, 2026 Kenneth HimmaAdd a Comment

Luka Burazin’s Naturalized Jurisprudence is an elegant discussion of the various movements to naturalize legal philosophy. Burazin differentiates between substantive and methodological naturalism, further distinguishing two types of substantive naturalism: “Ontological naturalism is a view that philosophy should accept as real or actually existing only (in a broad sense) natural things, properties, entities and phenomena (i.e., those identified through the methods of empirical sciences)…. Semantic naturalism is the view that a philosophical analysis of a concept must show it to be ‘analyzable in terms that admit of empirical inquiry’” (P. 1).

In contrast, he explains methodological naturalism as “the view that philosophical theorizing should abandon armchair theorizing on the basis of philosophers’ intuitions and common-sense beliefs (‘truisms’), thought experiments (hypothetical situations), and a priori conceptual analysis, and use instead the (empirical) methods of successful (natural and social) sciences and the scientific style of explanation.” (P. 1.)

It is worth noting at the outset that ontological naturalism, as stated here, appears to be inconsistent with the existence of propositional and non-propositional abstract objects, such as law, sets, and objective moral rules, which our linguistic practices assume exist, because picked out by noun-terms. If ontological naturalism is concerned to explain the world that we construct with our conceptual, mathematical, and evaluative practices, it seems to be a non-starter from the outset. If it is concerned with identifying some mind-independent truth, it seems unequipped to do so.

While an ontological naturalist might, as Burazin points out, explain law in terms of human behaviour and mental states, there are two problems. First, since mental states are not publicly observable, an ontological approach would have to rely on verbal testimony that describes their mental states, evidence that might not always be available. Second, it is not clear that law and its associated practices can be adequately explained without relying on abstract non-naturalistic objects, like norms and systems.

Burazin goes on to characterize American Legal Realism (ALR) as a form of methodological naturalism that “advocates replacing conceptual and normative (justificatory) theories with empirical and descriptive theories (thus changing the goals of theoretical inquiries), or normative naturalism, which aims to regulate a certain human practice (e.g., of acquiring knowledge or adjudicating) but requires that normative theories be based on empirical findings on which normative recommendations can actually be followed by their addresses and can actually produce the desired effects” (P. 2).

In his view, ALR advocates abandoning normative theories of how judges should decide cases with empirical studies of judicial behavior that do no more than explain the judges’ decisions in terms of their beliefs and inferences they make.

Of course, this seems to require that we utterly abandon normative theorizing about legitimate judicial decision-making. If the goal of theorizing about law is to understand the notion as we construct it, which comports with a methodological naturalist approach, then a replacement naturalism of this sort will fail to explain the most important dimensions of our shared lives together – our normative and evaluative practices. While, I suppose, those practices might be objectively mistaken (assuming such talk can be explained within a naturalistic framework), not being able to explain or even address them comprehensively greatly diminishes the utility and value of a naturalistic explanation.

Related to this line of thought, Burazin considers Leiter’s proposal “to abandon a priori conceptual analysis of the concept of law and turn jurisprudence into an abstract and reflective part of empirical social sciences of law, with the main task of jurisprudence being to offer ‘greater reflective clarity about the concepts invoked in the most powerful explanatory and predictive empirical social-scientific research on law” (P. 4).

One concern about Leiter’s proposal is that it seems to require abandoning all a priori analysis, leaving us no way to explain logical and mathematical reasoning – even if it countenances the existence of norms.  Deductive reasoning is a matter of evaluating inferences under certain standards of reasoning and is hence a priori in character.

None of this should be taken to deny, of course, the altogether sensible suggestions that empirical experimental methods are useful in clarifying the content of our concepts – especially if one takes the position that the only concepts to which we have epistemic access are the ones that are manufactured by our shared practices for using words.

Sensing these issues, Burazin proposes a “conceptually methodological naturalism” that “retains the conceptual goals of traditional jurisprudence … but requires that conceptual analysis be based on the empirically ascertained usage of the relevant words” (P. 5).

Indeed, this is the very template that Hart and Raz adopted, as both were concerned with analyzing our ordinary concept of law. As Hart put this important point at the beginning of the Preface to The Concept of Law:

More over, at many points, I have raised questions which may well be said to be about the meanings of words.… Many important distinctions, which are not immediately obvious, between types of social situations or relationships may best be brought to light by an examination of the standard uses of the relevant expressions and of the way in which these depend on a social context, itself left unstated.¹⁰

Similarly, as Raz explains:

The notion of law as designating a type of social institution is not … part of the scholarly apparatus of any learned discipline. It is not a concept introduced by academics to help explain some social phenomena. Rather, it is a concept entrenched in our society’s self-understanding…. It is part of our self-consciousness, of the way we conceive and understand our society…. That consciousness is part of what we study when we inquire into the nature of law.¹¹

It is hard to do justice to Burazin’s essay with so few words, but I can say this: in six pages, he manages to provide an accessible, though philosophically sophisticated, explanation of many different naturalistic theses. Though many of these positions remain contentious, as my discussion of them suggests, this is a well-written, elegantly organized discussion of a topic that has many dimensions. It is a fantastic starting point for anyone – theorists, students, and laypersons – interested in understanding the naturalistic movement.