Past as well as current theories of law’s autonomy do not fully account for the necessary extra-doctrinal underpinnings of legal materials, nor do they sufficiently appreciate the justificatory burden entailed by the prospective effects of every significant legal pronouncement. These shortcomings, however, do not imply the collapse of law as an academic enterprise robust enough to justify a separate category. Using the theories and methods of other disciplines definitely enriches our understanding of law, but these helpful exercises never suffice because they do not pay appropriate attention to the nature of law as a set of coercive normative institutions and, furthermore, tend to fragment rather than synthesize the interdisciplinary lessons of law. Legal theory compensates for both these limitations by focusing on the work of society’s coercive normative institutions and through its synthetic character.

Legal theory studies the traditions of these institutions and the craft typical of their members, while continuously challenging their outputs by demonstrating their contingency and testing their desirability. When performing these tasks, legal theory necessarily resorts to law’s neighboring disciplines. At its best, however, legal theory is more than a sophisticated synthesis of relevant insights from these friendly neighbors, because legal theory is consciously reflective on persistent jurisprudential questions regarding the nature of law, notably the relationship between law’s normativity and its coerciveness, given law’s institutional and structural characteristics.

I elucidate Rawls’s concept of public reason by recasting it in terms of two major concepts that are relevant to our understanding of the political: deliberation and justification. I argue that Rawls’s public reason should be read as having to do with justification rather than deliberation, and that Jurgen Habermas’s position on public reason is superior to that of Rawls in that it is premised on a clear distinction between deliberation and justification. However, some of Habermas’s critiques of Rawls are unjustified, and there is a contradiction in Habermas’s position.

I also argue that Habermas’s and Rawls’s positions epitomize “the anthropologization of politics” that follows from the substitution of the nation-state paradigm by the multicultural paradigm of the state. The rise of the multicultural paradigm also occasions “the anthropologization of courts”: liberal courts intervening in the cultural practices of non-liberal groups need to support their rulings with justifications internal to those groups, including justifications borrowed from the human rights doctrine.