Elephants and Flashlights

On Martin on Raz

Abstract

The paper responds to some of Margaret Martin’s criticisms of Joseph Raz’s legal theory in her book Judging Positivism, especially the alleged change in Raz’s account of adjudi-cation and its potential negative impact on Raz’s legal theory. To that end, I treat Raz’s theory in particular, and analytic legal theories in general, as providing a picture of what law would be like if it were fully determined by certain aspects rather than revealing essential aspects of what law is. In this sense, legal theories are compared, as in the famous Indian parable, to blind men trying to describe what an elephant is, a comparison that is later completed by the idea of the periodic rotation of a lantern, which illuminates each time a different aspect of the animal.