For more than forty years, jurisprudence has been dominated by the Hart-Dworkin debate. The debate starts from the premise that our legal practices generate rights and obligations that are distinctively legal, and the question at issue is how the content of these rights and obligations is determined. Positivists say that their content is determined ultimately or ex-clusively by social facts. Anti-positivists say that moral facts must play a part in determining their content. In this Essay, I argue that the debate rests on a mistake. Our legal practices do not gen-erate rights and obligations that are distinctively legal. At best, they generate moral rights and obligations, some of which we label legal. I defend this view by drawing analogies with other normative practices, like making promises, posting rules, and playing games. And I try to explain why it looks like legal practices generate distinctively legal rights and obligations even though they do not. I conclude with some thoughts about the questions that jurisprudence should pur-sue in the wake of the Hart-Dworkin debate.
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Prince, S. D. (2016). Where Does Desertification Occur? Mapping Dryland Degradation at Regional to Global Scales (pp. 225–263). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-16014-1_9
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