The U.S. Supreme Court’s 2024 ruling in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo ended the longstanding practice under which courts deferred to reasonable agency interpretations of unclear statutory language. Yet the Loper Bright Court erred in holding that such deference violated a federal statute. Deference to agencies is justified by their expertise and political accountability. Moreover, contrary to the majority’s suggestion, deference does not violate the law-declaration principle. Indeed, deference to other actors is inherent in the judicial function; courts routinely defer to other actors because ‘saying what the law is’ means identifying the authoritative utterances of those other actors. Although the non-deferential regime of Loper Bright might be seen as useful in the present moment—when federal agencies are asserting unprecedented powers—such a view misunderstands what is happening. The current U.S. administration is not adopting questionable but arguably reasonable interpretations of federal law. Across many domains, the current administration is simply acting lawlessly.

When does the law change in a system of precedents? The answer depends on how precedent is to be understood. There are three influential models, which are based on the ideas of rules, reasons, and analogies. We argue that these three theories make different assumptions about how the law changes in reaction to novel cases that do not overrule precedent. According to a version of the rule-based approach, the law changes if and only if a new case in a line of precedents reaches a different outcome; whereas, under the reason-based approach, the law changes with every new legal case, in proportion to the number of new features added to the doctrine by each case, regardless of outcome; and, finally, under the analogy-based approach, the law established by the precedent may change with every new case, in direct or inverse proportion to the differences found between cases, depending on the outcome. Although discussion about the nature of precedents often takes a normative perspective, in this paper we tackle it from an empirical perspective: How do people perceive legal change through precedent? Findings support the rule- and, to a very limited extent, the analogy-based approaches. The reason-based approach found no empirical support. We hypothesise that this reflects a conservative tendency to restrict legal change in precedents and to perceive it as non-incremental, thereby enhancing simplicity. Naturally, theorists may argue that the folk idea of when the law changes in a system of precedent is wrong. We suggest that legal theories should address a possible lack of a minimum descriptive requirement and that there are reasons of transparency and publicity to favour legal concepts that are closer to folk concepts.

This article substantiates Dworkin’s conjecture that the distinction between legal rules and principles is logical by advancing a logical-teleological framework grounded in the triad of facticity (Sein), prescriptivity (Sollen), and collective will (Wollen). It demonstrates that principles, rules, and policies correspond to irreducible logical forms: principles as value-based categorical judgments, rules as hypothetical judgments, and policies as relational judgments that coordinate diverse norms towards shared objectives. This framework posits Wollen as the essential bridge between facticity and prescriptivity, revealing the intrinsic purposive architecture of law, which the rule-principle dichotomy obscures. This reconstruction enriches the processes of adjudication, legislation, and legal education, offering a diagnostic tool for navigating the complexities of the modern regulatory state and legal technology.