I am deeply grateful for this symposium on The Idea of Human Rights. I am especially grateful to Marie Failinger, co-editor of the Journal of Law and Religion, who conceived the symposium and then brought it to fruition.

I am also greatly honored by this symposium. In particular, I am honored that the contributors to the symposium are thinkers whose own work I esteem.

I have learned from experience that my engagement with critical commentary on my work is much more likely to be genuinely productive on my part if I do not rush to respond. I am especially wary of rushing to respond at the present time, because for the past few years I have been in the grip of two sets of issues very different from those I addressed in The Idea of Human Rights. For now, suffice it to say the contributors to this symposium, each in her or his own way, have both broadened and deepened my understanding of the issues I addressed in The Idea of Human Rights. When I revisit those issues, as I expect to do in the next few years, I will turn to the important, difficult questions and arguments pressed by the symposiasts in the preceding essays. As Jean Bethke Elshtain, for one, has emphasized in her contribution, there is much more work to be done—important work.

In the mid-1970s, I attended one of the early conferences on Alternative Dispute Resolution (ADR). It was held in Stanton, Virginia in the heart of Mennonite country. At that point, very few people had heard of ADR, but almost all acknowledged that the civil litigation system was broken. The bar establishment was willing to look almost anywhere for help. There were American Bar Association representatives at the conference, and their attitude was one of curiosity that disputes might be resolved outside the traditional litigation and negotiation processes. At the conference, some of the leading speakers were members of Mennonite dispute resolution groups. They seemed to many lawyers as if they had stepped off of another planet, but they told of a history of dealing with disputes through alternate means. They served as teachers to the ABA and the rest of us. Since then, of course, everything has changed. ADR has swept the country. It would probably be malpractice for a lawyer to not consider alternative means for resolving civil disputes.

Professor Milner S. Ball extends an invitation to creativity. His essay offers a provocative new way to think about law. He examines neither specific codes and pronouncements nor traditional theories of jurisprudence. Ball instead takes a radically new tack in directing our attention to the much broader ways in which our society conceptualizes and expresses law. Carefully avoiding the use of definite and indefinite articles with the word “law,” he suggests that law possesses a far more powerful essence than simply functional or utilitarian qualities. Within the context of his metaphorical thinking, law becomes an all-pervasive experience which embodies and reflects our experiences and assumptions. If one takes Ball's suggestion seriously, which I do, that metaphors are “a fundamental mode of understanding and experience,” then the task in part becomes to expose the substance of such an understanding and experience.

To what extent can human legal thought be encompassed by the divine and share its character, or alternatively, stand free of the divine and constitute an autonomous field of normativity? Answers to these large questions may understandably differ, yet answers appear both necessary and important. If human legal thought is somehow brought within the divine, it may share its immutable character, and ossify. Islamic law, at least in its Sunni variant, may currently represent an example of this. If human legal thought stands free of divinity, it may be fundamentally lacking in authority. Examples are found in failed states, and perhaps elsewhere. The religions and laws of the world therefore provide answers, often nuanced, to the questions, and even correctives to the answers they provide. The debate turns around the notion of tradition.

To evaluate the overall good/welfare of any action, policy or institutional choice we need some way of comparing the benefits and losses to those affected: we need to make interpersonal comparisons of the good/welfare. Yet sceptics have worried either: (1) that such comparisons are impossible as they involve an impossible introspection across individuals, getting ‘into their minds’; (2) that they are indeterminate as individual-level information is compatible with a range of welfare numbers; or (3) that they are metaphysically mysterious as they assume the existence either of a social mind or of absolute levels of welfare when no such things exist. This article argues that such scepticism can potentially be addressed if we view the problem of interpersonal comparisons as fundamentally an epistemic problem – that is, as a problem of forming justified beliefs about the overall good based on evidence of the individual good.

This article offers a description of a particular lexical item, the English word bit, from a meaning potential perspective making use of the framework lexical meaning as ontologies and construals (LOC). The lexical semantics for bit is described not in terms of meanings per se, but rather in terms of potential for cueing conceptual structures of varying schematicity, put to use through a range of cognitive processes, or construals. The article concludes that some conceptual structures are quite fundamental to bit’s use and that their construal is highly flexible and contextually sensitive. The semantic structures evoked by bit are realized through particular communicative and discursive settings, and these semantic structures provide the raw material for all its situated meanings in response to communicative demands. Ultimately, a meaning potential perspective, in particular the model for describing and explaining lexical meaning adopted in this article, facilitates a rich and explicatory description of bit, both as regards its fundamental structures and their construal in attested language use.

‘Speaking’ and ‘belonging’ have a particular salience as indices of intimacy in a remote corner of northwest Greenland where connectedness is constantly reinforced through a distinct commonality of expression and certain social practices, such as very frequent visiting of one another, story-telling, recycling of names and a shared monistic philosophy. The Inugguit define themselves by a repertoire of communicative and behavioural strategies which are used to ensure that one is accepted in a supportive kin group: the perennial social and personal imperative for each member of the group. This article shows how despite social and climatic upheaval, these practices remain, but that the hunters’ ‘symbiotic’ relationship with nature is eroding as the loss of sea ice means they can no longer live like the animals they hunt.