Planning from a Legal Point of View

Legality is a monograph scoring distinct contributions across the board of jurisprudential discourse. Among the most prominent arguments marshalled in this book is an impressively robust defence of reductionism about legal norms. The concept of a plan is invoked in the service of delivering a formidable task, that of disembarrassing the legal philosopher of the quest for what makes legal norms metaphysically distinct. The answer is simple, yet relies on an intricate chain of arguments: talk of legal norms (and institutions) is just a linguistic convention for referring to a metaphysically more versatile kind of object, namely, plans (and planning institutions). This essay aims to record and evaluate the metaphysical implications of this reductionist turn. More precisely, it shall locate two defensible, yet sharply divergent, variants of plan positivism which Shapiro"s dense analysis appears to conflate at the expense of his theory"s explanatory ambitions. The concern this essay intends to raise regards an unpronounced tension between the anti-metaphysical, so to speak, implications of Shapiro"s perspectival analysis of the use of normative language in law and Shapiro"s ontologically committing arguments about the reduction of legal norms to planning

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