Numerous legal scholars have adopted the view that H. L. A. Hart offered an expressivist (or at least proto-expressivist) account of legal discourse. But philosophers of law have given comparatively little attention to the prospect of developing newer forms of legal expressivism informed by contemporary metaethics. One notable exception is Kevin Toh, who has recently addressed this constructive project. This article critically evaluates Toh's contributions to the project of legal expressivism. Despite the value of Toh's work in reviving legal expressivism as an explanatory strategy in jurisprudence, neither he nor anyone else has paid sufficient attention to the most important question now facing legal expressivists. I call this the “question of content”: to wit, what distinguishes the mental states expressed by legal statements from the mental states expressed in other forms of normative discourse? I argue that theorists interested in legal expressivism must prioritize this question.

Several theorists argue that blackmail is morally wrong because the blackmail proposal is coercive. These coercion-based views are promising but incomplete. A full explanation of blackmail's immorality must address both the blackmail proposal and the blackmail agreement. I defend what I call the complex account, on which blackmail is morally wrong because blackmail proposals are coercive and blackmail agreements are fraudulent. The complex account avoids difficulties that beset other coercion-based views and provides a stronger case for why blackmail should be criminalized.

There are two distinct types of legal wrongdoing: civil and criminal. This article demonstrates in three ways that Immanuel Kant's Universal Principle of Right, properly interpreted, offers a plausible and resilient account of this important distinction. First, Kant's principle correctly identifies attempted crimes as crimes themselves even when they do not violate the rights of any individual. Second, it justifies our treatment of reckless endangerment as a crime by distinguishing it from ordinary negligence, traditionally thought to be only civilly wrong. Third, it explains and justifies differences between the features of traditional criminal punishments and the features of civil remedies. Moreover, the Universal Principle of Right yields a Kantian standard for criminal wrongdoing that is compelling enough to inform future philosophical inquiries into the nature and limits of the state's criminal lawmaking authority.