Acknowledgments

My thinking about the issues discussed in this book has benefited enormously from discussions with many people over the past several years. In settings ranging from the classroom to conferences and workshops to discussion groups, students, colleagues, and others have posed sharp questions and probing criticisms and provided patient guidance for my initial forays into legal philosophy. Space does not permit me to name all of those whose contributions have made a difference. I am particularly thankful, however, to Onkar Ghate, Tom Bowden, Robert Mayhew, Greg Salmieri, Steve Simpson, Larry Salzman, Dana Berliner, Adam Mossoff, and Amy Peikoff. In Austin, Al Martinich, Matt Miller, and Arif Panju have supplied a steady stream of congenial intellectual agitation about legal practices and legal principles (joined, for different periods of our ongoing discussion group, by Wesley Hottot, Andrew Ingram, Sam Krauss, Adam Phillips, Steve Davey, and Michael Sevel).

Funding from the BB&T Chair for the Study of Objectivism and the Anthem Foundation has allowed me to organize related workshops and conferences and to hire research assistants. I am very grateful to these institutions, as well as to those assistants for their labors: Kate Ritchie, Malcolm Keating, Jerry Green, Sam Krauss, Simone Gubler, and Megan Hyska, who prepared the Index. I am also grateful to the University of Texas for granting me leave time to devote to the book, and to the Washington University Jurisprudence Review for allowing me to use material originally included in my article “Neutrality Isn’t Neutral: On the Value-Neutrality of the Rule of Law,” which appeared in its volume 4, issue 1, in 2011.

At Cambridge, John Berger and his staff have been a pleasure to work with. Their support – in spirit as well as in meticulous material detail – is much appreciated.

The large number of people listed here should in no way be read to diminish the substantial benefits I have reaped from each of them. Nor, my appreciation.