Grounds of Law and Legal Theory: A Response
JOHN FINNIS
An edited version of this response to five amicable critics at a 2007 conference on Professor
Finnis's work in legal philosophy is forthcoming in Legal Theory 13 (2008) 315-344
University of Oxford Faculty of Law Legal Studies Research Paper Series
Working Paper No 06/2008 February 2008
This paper can be downloaded without charge from the
Social Science Research Network electronic library at:
http://papers.ssrn.com/Abstract=1094691
An index to the working papers in the
University of Oxford Faculty of Law Research Paper Series is located at:
<http://www.ssrn.com/link/oxford-legal-studies.html>
Revision 15 Dec 07
1
Grounds of Law and Legal Theory: A Response
John Finnis
These responding reflections follow broadly the order of discussion in Natural Law &
Natural Rights and Aquinas: Moral, Political, and Legal Theory, and often hark back to
those and other previous efforts of mine. But I hope they also move things along a bit.
I
In my first Oxford paper in legal and moral theory, delivered in debate with
Philippa Foot,1 I explored Aristotle's theory of central cases and focal meanings a little
more fully than I did ten years later in NLNR. Hart had said, and had worked on the
basis, that "the diverse range of cases of which the word ?law' is used are not linked by
? simple uniformity, but by less direct relations ? often of analogy of either form or
content to a central case."2 He had referred us to Aristotle's discussion of the homonymy
or, in its broad sense, "analogy" of health. But he had quite overlooked how Aristotle
applies his concept of focal meaning to the concepts used in the philosophy of human
affairs, concepts su ...