Kenneth Einar Himma (Seattle Pacific University) has posted Positivism and Interpreting Legal Content: Does Law Call for a Moral Semantics? (Ratio Juris, forthcoming) on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
In a two fascinating papers, Jules Coleman has been considering an idea, first articulated and defended by Scott Shapiro in his forthcoming book Legality, that, law calls for a moral semantics. In a recent paper, Coleman argues it is a conceptual truth that legal content stating behavioral requirements, whether construed as propositions or imperatives, can "truthfully be redescribed as expressing a moral directive or authorization" (Coleman 2007, 592). For example, the directive "mail fraud is illegal" expresses, if not that mail fraud is morally wrong, then that we have a content-independent moral reason for not committing mail fraud. In this essay, I will attempt to explicate and evaluate Coleman’s arguments, as well as attempt to determine what I will call the "Redescription Thesis" amounts to.