In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries
in the United States, work in what would now be called the
philosophy of law took the form of theory in the conflict of laws.
American philosophers of law as diverse as Wesley Newcomb Hohfeld,
the American legal realists, and Ronald Dworkin all started out
working on the field. Indeed, American legal realism began as an
attack on Joseph Henry Beale's vested rights theory of choice of
law. Since the advent of professionalized philosophy of law,
however, the relationship between the conflict of laws and the
philosophy of law have been criminally neglected. There is so much
to be done that I plan on working on the topic for the rest of my
productive life. Aside from my related work on Kelsen's doctrine of the unity of law, I
have produced the following so far:
Legal Monism: An American
History, in Christoph Bezemek, Michael Potacs and
Alexander Somek (eds.), Vienna Lectures on Legal Philosophy
23-48 (Hart Publishing 2018)
In this paper, I argue that American conflicts
scholars in the late-nineteenth and early twentieth century
were committed to monism: the view that necessarily one, and
only one, legal system exists.'
An argument from how
courts reason in conflicts cases to legal monism. I offer
these monistic arguments as reason to think that the moral
impact theory of law, of the sort offered by Mark Greenberg,
is correct.