What is the clean hands defense (CHD) normatively about? Courts designate court integrity as the CHD's primary norm. Yet, while the CHD may at times further court integrity, it is not fully aligned with court integrity. In addition to occasionally instrumentally furthering certain goods (e.g., court legitimacy, judge integrity, deterrence), the CHD embodies two judicially undetected norms: retribution and tu quoque (“you too!”). Tu quoque captures the moral intuition that wrongdoers are in no position to blame, condemn, or make claims on others who are guilty of similar or related wrongdoing. The CHD shares the structure of the tu quoque: both are doctrines of standing that deflate the illocutionary force (and not the truth-value) of normative speech acts directed against wrongdoers by those guilty of similar or connected wrongdoing. The CHD also exhibits retributive logic: it sanctions plaintiffs by reason of their wrongdoing and manifests the retributive principle that “punishment must fit the crime.”

The possibility of collective action is essential to human freedom; yet, as Rousseau famously argued, individuals acting together allow themselves to depend on one another's choices and thereby jeopardize one another's freedom. These two facts jointly constitute what I call the normative problem of collective action. I argue that solving this problem is harder than it looks: it cannot be done merely in terms of moral obligations; indeed, it ultimately requires putting in place a full-fledged system of contract rights. The point has important ramifications for contract theory: the role that contract rights play in reconciling collective action and freedom turns out to be crucial to understanding how—and by whom—these rights can legitimately be enforced. It also explains why expectation damages should be the standard remedy for breach of contract.

This article addresses the question of whether judges can take the internal point of view toward—accept—their legal system's rule of recognition for purely prudential reasons. It takes a fresh look at an underappreciated conceptual argument of Joseph Raz's that answers: no. In a nutshell, Raz argues that purely prudential reasons are reasons of the wrong kind for judges to accept their legal system's rule of recognition. And should Raz's argument succeed, an important necessary connection between law and morality would be established.