It cannot be easy being the holder of the Oxford University Chair in Jurisprudence, a Chair previously held by giants in the field, H.L.A. Hart and Ronald Dworkin. John Gardner has responded to the challenge of this role by writing a continuing stream of important essays across a wide variety of topics and themes. A previous collection of his articles appeared as Offences and Defences: Selected Essays in the Philosophy of Criminal Law (Oxford, 2007). A second collection, focusing on ‘law in general’, has now appeared: Law as a Leap of Faith. All but two of the essays in this collection were previously published elsewhere (according to the author, small corrections were made to some of these, and more substantial changes to two (p. v); these changes include amendments made in response to criticisms of the original versions of the article (p. 167 n. 28)).

One can imagine that there might great pressure for the Oxford Professor of Jurisprudence to follow his predecessors in the Chair by coming up with a new grand theory of law, but Gardner insists that he does not ‘a theory of law’ (p. v). He goes further to declare: ‘You will struggle to find any conspicuously novel ideas about law in the book.’ (p. vi) This is a misstatement, or perhaps just undue modesty. Every essay in this collection contains many interesting and important claims, insights, and speculations, if not ‘about law’, then about legal theory.

Gardner's work is within the legal positivist tradition of H. L. A. Hart and Joseph Raz (though there are more friendly criticisms of Hart's work than there is of Raz's), and a significant portion of the articles are defenses of that tradition against its best-known modern-day critics, Ronald Dworkin and John Finnis. Many of the ‘usual suspects’ in analytical jurisprudence courses – including Hans Kelsen, John Austin, and Lon Fuller – get detailed discussions. However, for better or for worse, there is little discussion of theorists outside the analytical tradition (e.g., American or Scandinavian legal realism, feminist legal theory, critical legal studies, critical legal studies, Marxist legal theory, law and economics, etc.), beyond some pointed responses to sociological approaches to law, though even here the context is mostly the defense of Hart's theory against sociologically-grounded criticisms.

Inevitably, different readers will find some essays more pertinent to their interests than others, and will likely have different favourites among the essays included. Among the pieces included in the book is one of the most influential recent articles on the debate between legal positivism and natural law theory, ‘Legal Positivism: 5½ Myths’ (pp. 19–53). ‘5½ Myths’ offers important clarifications (with which most legal positivists would agree), including the clarification that legal positivism is not a theory about the adjudication, e.g., that judges should only apply existing law in deciding cases, or that judges should never make new law, only apply existing law. The piece also contains some more controversial claims; among the latter is the view that legal positivism, properly understood, is only about the legal validity of norms. Other theorists, the present writer included, might include as part of the legal positivist approach claims about when a normative system qualified as ‘legal’ and claims about what role moral evaluation should play in the construction of a theory about (the nature of) law.

Gardner consistently takes on intricate, difficult topics, like the deceptively complex question of whether law, by its nature, makes moral claims (pp. 125–148). Here and throughout the book, the author does a masterful job of clarifying the underlying issues, even if his ultimate argument may not convince all readers. The problem Gardner's discussion here uncovers, even if it does not fully resolve, is that any discussion about the relationship of law and morality requires not only a clear view of what counts as law, but also a clear view of what counts as morality. And it is sometimes the theory of morality that is insufficiently formed or inadequately justified.

In ‘The Legality of Law’ (pp. 177–194), Gardner makes the nice point that one contrast between Hart's theory with those of Austin and Kelsen is that Hart saw the advantage of building his analysis around the distinctiveness of legal systems rather than the distinctiveness of laws or legal norms. Austin viewed all laws as basically commands of a sovereign; Kelsen saw all laws as essentially authorizations to judges to impose sanctions under certain conditions. Central to Hart's criticism of Austin, and a central part of Hart's own approach to law, was that there was significant variety to law (e.g., that legal rules could be both duty-imposing and power-conferring, and that there were both primary and secondary rules), and any theory that tried to reduce all of law to one form or one type would inevitably impose significant distortions.

That essay, combined with the book's fine discussion of the rule of law (built over two essays, one on Fuller's views (pp. 195–220) and one on Hart's (pp. 221–237)), and an incisive discussion of law and justice (pp. 238–269), Gardner builds important points that neither ‘legality’ nor the rule of law, nor even justice, should be seen as the ultimate or primary virtues of legal systems. The rule of law may be principles that are distinctive to legal systems, but that is different from asserting that these are the most important objectives of legal systems. Even justice, for Gardner, needs to be kept in its proper place. Certainly, for adjudication, justice is a primary objective; however, there are other areas of law (less concerned with winners and losers, and less concerned with ‘essentially allocative’ tasks (p. 267)) where a concern with justice might be entirely out of place or may be subordinated to other objectives.

In a later essay, Gardner offers an effective response to criticisms of Hart's theory of law that have come from some sociologists, a response also to the occasional general misunderstanding of jurisprudence that can sometimes be found in the work of such scholars. Gardner argues that when sociologists treat law as a ‘functional kind’, and then complain that Hart's approach is (relative to their approach) too narrow, it is the sociologists who are making the basic error. The misunderstanding is that ‘social sciences have no use for the classification of anything as law. For law is not a function kind. It is a modal kind. … [L]aw is distinguished from many of its near neighbours … by how it serves the many social functions that it … serves ….’ (p. 293, emphasis added). Law is a mode rather than a function: law is a method that entails ‘the use of rules largely effective across a general population, and officials who apply them and who claim authority and supremacy in doing so’ (p. 293).

One of the pleasures of reading Law as a Leap of Faith is the sharp insights one comes across on topics some distance from ‘law in general’: e.g., a nice response to or clarification of Socrates's Euthyphro paradox on the connection between divine command and morality (pp. 1–7), a good explanation of the concept of collective intentions (in legislative contexts but in other areas as well) (pp. 62–65), a consideration (though ultimate rejection) of the provocative argument that all constitutions need to be unwritten constitutions (pp. 89–124), and a nice contribution to the debate regarding whether it makes sense to ask whether it is rational to be moral (pp. 149–161).

In a collection of essays offered as being about ‘law in general’ (and which contains an essay with that same title (pp. 270–301)), one might have expected more on the debates regarding the possibility of general jurisprudence, and the use of conceptual analysis in jurisprudence. General jurisprudence is mostly defended against some of Dworkin's less well-considered claims, e.g., that jurisprudence should focus only on individual legal systems or that any argument that was not doctrinal was ‘sociological’ and (for that reason?) not very interesting. Gardner makes predictably short work of such views, but more substantial challenges to general jurisprudence (e.g., Brian Leiter's argument that conceptual analysis is a misguided methodology and that most theories about the nature of law can be little more than folk beliefs and the author's intuitions; or Stephen Perry's argument that theories about the nature of law inevitably require moral judgments at their core) are left undiscussed. The little that is said about conceptual analysis (pp. 276 n. 14, 297–301) is characteristically precise and helpful, which only leaves the reader wishing for more.

Even with the quibbles mentioned, this is a most impressive book. Early in the work, Gardner offers the following summary of his views about the role of Philosophy: ‘Philosophy is not the art of compiling as many little thoughts as possible into as few big thoughts as possible, but the art of wearing every thought down to its rightful little size and then keeping it in its rightful little place’ (p. v). This diamond-cutter's precision is well displayed throughout Law as a Leap of Faith.