Freedom, Benefit and Understanding: Reflections on Laurence Claus's Critique of Authority

With wide-ranging and illuminating determination, Law's Evolution and Human Understanding offers a refutation of the illusion of authority. No one, it rightly contends, has the right to be obeyed. Still less, as it correctly says, do any persons have the right that their say so be obeyed because they said so. Given the book's stipulative definition of "authority", these truths entail that authority is an illusion, and provide some important premises for a plausible further conclusion or pair of conclusions: it is harmful, both in practice and in theory, to say that some person or body has authority ("the rule of men"); and harmful to offer to explain law ("the rule of law") as a result of authority; and perhaps harmful even to say that it is authoritative. In this article, the author touches on seven overlapping topics or clusters of topics: duties of compliance; predictions and expectations; responsibilities; purposes; decisions; presumptions; and evolution by intelligent design.