as they cannot be presumed to be universal or even widespread. But is such sympathy an adequate basis for morality?

It may be that, in appropriately demanding circumstances, if faced with a choice between saving my doting cat and a yobbish skinhead human, I would select the former over the latter. Theorists such as Singer and Regan attempt to provide some basis for a moral defence of this choice. Conventional morality-ancient, mediaeval and modern-would condemn my decision, even though there might be much sympathy with it. It seems to me that if the valuations are to be reversed, we need theory that breaks the link with the past more robustly and thoroughly than are acknowledged to be necessary in Sorabji's erudite and enlightening book. THE QUEENS UNIVERSITY O F BELFAST J.D.G. EVANS

PHILOSOPHY OF LAW

Moral Aspects 0fL.qal 7heov: Essays on Law, Justice, and Political Responsibilig By DAVID LYONS Cambridge University Press, 1993. xiv + 218 pp. $49.94 cloth, $15.95 papcr

This volume collects ten essays that David Lyons, a philosopher and legal theorist at Cornell, has written over the last twenty-two years. The first six, filling roughly two-thirds of the book, treat a number of traditional jurisprudential topics, such as the relation between law and moral principles and the extent to which justice is done if a judge adheres to certain formal rules. The final four, which are also the most recent, evidence a shift in Lyons's interests. They focus on the way in which judges should interpret legal materials, in particular the American Constitution. Lyons follows Ronald Dworkin in insisting that official decision makers should construe relevant legal sources in the normatively most defensible way that they can. He suggcsts, however, that this approach might, despite judges' best efforts, yield an unjust result more frequently than Dworkin acknowledges.

From one perspective, grouping these essays between two covers makes sense. Their themes are interrelated and, because half were published in philosophy journals and half in law reviews, they might not all be readily accessible to interested readers in the absence of this book. From another perspective, their joint publication is questionable. Partly because of their brevity and overlapping, the essays together cover little ground. In addition, many seem dated. Perhaps, like platform shoes, their preoccupations will return to fashion, but at present several have an outmoded quality.

Thc first half dozen essays, except for the excellent title piece analysing various ways in which the positivist thesis that law is separate from morals might be glossed, engage old debates between Hart and Fuller, Dworkin and Raz, that no longcr scem as urgent as they once did. The major rcason for this tidal movement was the publication of Ronald Dworkin's book, Laws Empire, in 1986. That event, together with a new emphasis in other disciplines on textual interpretation and the battle over judicial ideology touched off by

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President Reagan’s controversial appointments to the bench, pressed legal scholars to consider, more carefully than they had, how statutes should be read and above all how the United States Constitution should be construed. Lyons’s last four essays, all of which highlight problems of constitutional interpretation, ride this trend.

The recurring claim in these final essays is that every legal decision requires what Lyons calls “substantive moral justification” (p. 202). Parties before a judge cannot plausibly be said to have consented to whatever rule is found to govern their case by signing a social contract or playing a meaningful part in drafting any legislation that might apply. Compelling one party to pay another, or sending a defendant to prison, must therefore be justified by reference to the moral correctness of a particular legal decision or to the claim to obedience that a system of justice makes in virtue of the benefits it extends to the party that would suffer under it.

This is a valid, if not a controversial, point. Lyons makes no attempt in these essays, however, to build a theory of political obligation or to explain when injustice in a particular case may be outweighed by the gains accruing to the wronged party from the institutions of government in general or the legal system in particular. Nor does he say how judges should act if the law threatens to make them agents of injustice. For example, Lyons suggests that denying blacks who had lived in territories prohibiting slavery standing to sue for their freedom prior to the Civil War was an injustice that a federal judge should not have perpetrated. But if the law was clear on this point (Lyons thinks it was not), what should a judge have done? Should he have lied about what he thought the law required, to ensure a morally unimpeach- able result? Should he have resigned? Lyons offers no advice. More important, he does not describe contemporary examples of laws that, in his opinion, should not bc enforced in the United States or the United Kingdom. If there are none, his question is of little practical interest.

Lyons is correct in saying that partisans of the view that constitutional provisions should be read as their authors intended, such as Robert Bork, need to expound their position more carefully and to produce some moral justification for the theory of interpretation they favour. Similarly, he is right to ask Ronald Dworkin and others to defend their theories of adjudication and legal authority by resort to an underlying, normatively persuasive theory of government. Unfortunately, these short essays do not begin the hard work of answering the crucial questions they pose. I H b LrNIVERSITY O F C:ALIFORNIA AT BERKELEY ERIC RAKOM‘SKI

Mind, Machine, and Metaphor: An Essay on Art$cial Intellkence and Legal Reasoning

Westview Press, 1993. viii + 144 pp. $49.95 cloth By ALEXANDER E. SILVERMAN

Anyone who has developed an outsider’s fascination with recent developments in A.I. is bound to start wondering what his own discipline will look like in a few years’ time, when intelligence-real, though artificially created

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