It is commonly held that we wrong someone if we punish them without first determining whether they are guilty through the process of a sufficiently fair and reliable procedure. This wrong is best explained by pre-institutional moral procedural rights. Recently, Christopher Heath Wellman has argued for the skeptical conclusion that there are no such rights, challenging a widely held orthodoxy. I propose two novel grounds for pre-institutional moral procedural rights and so answer Wellman's skepticism. First, we have rights not to be subject to punitive systems that do not include specific sorts of reliable procedures because otherwise we are subject to unreasonable risks of undeserved punishment. Second, not only do we have rights that others not harm us or unreasonably risk harming us, we have rights that they control for avoiding wrongfully harming us across relevant close possible worlds.

The “small improvement problem” (“the Problem”) applies when no option in a comparison is best nor, it seems, are the options equal, because a small improvement to one would fail to make it the better choice. I argue that vagueness causes the Problem, such that the options are vaguely equal or vaguely “related.” I then unpack an important instance of the Problem, the comparison between a crime and a punishment upon which the ideal of a retributively deserved sentence is based. I argue that this comparison is not only vague, but remarkably vague, leading to an expansive array of “not undeserved” sentences. I conclude, however, that retributivism can only justify the least harmful “not undeserved” sentence.

Law being a derivative feature of reality, it exists in virtue of more fundamental things, upon which it depends. This raises the question of what is the relation of dependence that holds between law and its more basic determinants. The primary aim of this paper is to argue that grounding is that relation. We first make a positive case for this claim, and then we defend it from the potential objection that the relevant relation is rather rational determination.1 Against this challenge, we argue that the apparent objection is really no objection, for on its best understanding, rational determination turns out to actually be grounding. Finally, we clarify the framework for theories on law-determination that results from embracing our view; by way of illustration, we offer a ground-theoretic interpretation of Hartian positivism and show how it can defuse an influential challenge to simple positivist accounts of law.