The account of law in Plato's Minos is on its surface strange. Law is both what “wants to be the finding out of what is” and “the finding out of what is.” It is a faculty in us like sight or hearing, and its stability requires that it be independent of us. It makes universal claims but always does so for a particular people in a particular place. Law must be grounded in what is beyond the law, and yet, once established, must assert its own final authority. Lawgivers must be at once above the law, almost a different species from those for whom they legislate, and, like everyone else, subject to the law. These ambiguities, indeed duplicities, are not so much defects of law to be resolved as indications of its fundamental nature. What follows is an account of this dual nature, especially in its necessary connection to poetry.

When discussing the preconditions of liberal Islamic politics, liberal theorists often advocate the reinterpretation of traditional religious texts in light of liberal political theory. Such an interpretive project is worth comparing to a similar project conceived by the medieval Islamic philosopher Alfarabi, whose effort to introduce Greek political philosophy into his political-religious community parallels these efforts to introduce liberal theory into Islamic communities. Alfarabi argued that traditional texts should be reinterpreted in light of a new political science, one based on Greek sources but adapted to the unique needs of a community like his. This article shows how Alfarabi conceived of these adaptations, emphasizing the flexibility that he thought students of Greek political philosophy should adopt in accommodating even Islamic doctrines that they could not fully accept.

Recent interpretations of Rousseau suggest that autonomy is the master concept by which to understand his justification of the state. The Rousseauian state is legitimate insofar as it enables individuals to obey only their own wills and thus to be free. Autonomy-based interpretations cannot adequately account for Rousseau's remarks on the role of the state in securing a collective form of happiness through political community. These interpretations incorrectly construe collective happiness as pertaining only to how civic-minded citizens might be psychologically motivated to obey the state's dictates, rather than to what makes the state legitimate. By contrast, I offer a new interpretation according to which the Rousseauian state is justified because it enables a mutually constitutive relationship between the autonomy of individuals and the happiness that stems from participation in political community.

The essay discusses the interpretation of Aristotle's natural right teaching by Leo Strauss. This interpretation ought to be seen as the result of an investigation into the history of philosophy and of an attempt to philosophically address political problems. By virtue of this twofold origin, the Straussian commentary is unorthodox: it deviates from traditional Aristotelianism (Aquinas and Averroes) and it seems alien to the text of the Nicomachean Ethics. Strauss's criticism of medieval variants results from their incapacity—shared by contemporary political thought—to address a perplexing issue: political exception. He sees in Aristotle's political teaching a way to escape from this failure: the unification, in natural right, of the requirements of statesmanship and ethics. The discovery of this way allowed Strauss to produce an interpretation of natural right that articulates important points pertaining to Aristotelian political science.

In the debate about the legitimacy of judicial supremacy, Cooper v. Aaron, the Little Rock desegregation case, is identified by both sides as critical to their argument. Defenders insist that Cooper exemplifies the need for a final authority in matters constitutional. Critics argue that the Court was wrong as a matter of democratic theory or empirical reality. In this article I argue that while it is true as a matter of empirical reality that the Court's interpretation is not the final word, the Court's assertion can be defended nonetheless. Relying on archival sources from the case, I explore the conditions under which the Court made the claim. To defend Cooper, however, does not require the defense of all assertions of judicial supremacy. I conclude by offering a preliminary analysis of how we might distinguish between more legitimate assertions of judicial supremacy and less legitimate ones.