View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by Washington University St. Louis: Open Scholarship Washington University Jurisprudence Review Volume 7 | Issue 1 2014 On the Conceptual Confusions of Jurisprudence Aaron J. Rappaport Follow this and additional works at: https://openscholarship.wustl.edu/law_jurisprudence Part of the Courts Commons, History of Philosophy Commons, Judges Commons, Jurisprudence Commons, Legal History Commons, Legal Theory Commons, and the Rule of Law Commons Recommended Citation Aaron J. Rappaport, On the Conceptual Confusions of Jurisprudence, 7 Wash. U. Jur. Rev. 77 (2014). Available at: https://openscholarship.wustl.edu/law_jurisprudence/vol7/iss1/7 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Law School at Washington University Open Scholarship. It has been accepted for inclusion in Washington University Jurisprudence Review by an authorized administrator of Washington University Open Scholarship. For more information, please contact
[email protected]. ON THE CONCEPTUAL CONFUSIONS OF JURISPRUDENCE AARON J. RAPPAPORT INTRODUCTION For more than half a century, legal theory has focused on a particular objective—to understand and describe the “concept” of law.1 In that pursuit, theorists have employed a methodology aptly called “conceptual analysis.”2 The result has been a series of striking claims about law's nature—that law has a fixed essence, that it is fundamentally normative, that it is based on the “marriage” of primary and secondary