The nature of authority has been much debated in legal and political philosophy, and the terminology is not stable. I shall begin by stipulating how I understand some of the key terms used in this paper1. I consider authority here as a property of laws and of legal systems. Authority must be distinguished primarily from power, efficacy, and validity. Authority is not the same as power. A person or institution may have the power to affect the way that people behave, but lack authority because he, she, or it is purely coercive. Authority is not the same thing as efficacy; efficacy simply means that there is conformity to the rules of the system, whether willing conformity or not. But it is possible for there to be conformity to the laws of a successful repressive system, and such a system would not have authority. Authority is not the same as validity. To be valid is to be pedigreed by the rule of recognition of the legal system. A legal rule may have that property, and yet lack authority because it is not a rule which there is any obligation to obey. If the law has authority, then the demands that the law makes of us are such that we ought to conform to them. Theorists sometimes distinguish between “legitimate authority” and “de facto authority”. It follows from the above that in my terminology “authority” means legitimate authority as that term has been typically understood, as authority which issues directives we have an obligation to obey. “Legitimate authority” is pleonastic.

In his 1972 paper commissioned by the Inquiry on the Position of the French Language and on Language Rights in Quebec, Professor Francois Chevrette questioned the legal significance of the notion of “collective rights”:

Modern medicine has been enormously successful in saving and extending lives. No one can reasonably regret this, but it exacerbates a problem which has always been with us, namely, how to treat those who are alive, but not living lives they think worthwhile, and have no prospects for anything better. Under current Canadian law, one who wants to die can either commit suicide, or, if he is competent, refuse all treatment necessary for life. But one does not always have the ability and opportunity to do the former, and the latter does not always bring about a gentle and easy death for either the patient or his loved ones. The question thus arises as to whether we should make legal provision for assisted suicide - providing the means of suicide - and active voluntary euthanasia - killing the patient on request. The Canadian Law Reform Commission1 has recently taken up this question, and answered with a clear “No.” I shall argue in what follows that the answer should be “Yes.”

This paper explores how an adequate understanding of legal relations can be aided by, and sometimes requires, returning to the foundations of our conception of legal relations.

The process of conceptualization is a process of revealing the form in legal relations. The two most fundamental forms of legal relations, first enunciated by Aristotle, are corrective justice and distributive justice. The thesis of this paper is that an analysis of legal relations can be coherent only if it is faithful to the form of justice appropriate to the particular legal relation under study.

The opposition between originalism and relativism is a persistent dualism in current debates over the nature of legal interpretation. For many legal academics, choice in interpretive theory is limited to the either/or of the authorial model of discourse or the “anything goes” approach of relativism of one stripe or another.

The struggle between these interpretive polar opposites had its origins in literary theory. In their classic essay, “The Intentional Fallacy,” W.K. Wimsatt and Monroe C. Beards ley argued that the only meaning worth investigating was that found in the literary text: to search after the “real intentions” of an author was to chase ghosts. Wimsatt and Beardsley influenced a generation of critics, but their thesis has, of late, been challanged anew.