Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 January 2015
The question of legal optimism presupposes the development of a normative stance regarding the law’s evolution. Only with a sense of where the law should be going can one be optimistic—or pessimistic for that matter—regarding its development. Thus, the possibility of legal optimism depends on disclosing the normative stance toward the law’s evolution suggested by the law’s moral creativity. What we need is a legal theory for civil society analogous to our legal theory of the market.
1 For other writers on the subject, see Thomas W. Dunfee, “On the Synergistic, Interdependent Relation of Business Ethics and Law,” American Business Law Journal 34 (1996): 317; Lynn Sharp Paine, “Law, Ethics, and Managerial Judgment,” Journal of Legal Studies Education 12 (1994): 15.
2 For both an excellent account of and challenge to the market failure theory of government regulation, see Mark Sagoff, The Economy of the Earth: Philosophy, Law, and the Environment (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988).
3 Mary Ann Glendon, Rights Talk: The Impoverishment of Political Discourse (New York: The Free Press, 1991).