I want to thank the editors of Law and Social Inquiry for giving me the chance to convey my immense admiration—indeed, reverence would not be too strong a word—for James Heckman and his work, on the occasion of his being awarded the 2000 Nobel prize in economics. It's a great pleasure to be able publicly to acknowledge my personal and professional debts to Jim; but I've come to realize that it's also a great burden to have to say something worthy of the occasion and the person. Jim's own writing tends toward the terse rather than the expansive. In that spirit, the tersest thing I can say that adequately conveys the importance of his work is that I'm certain that people will still be reading and talking about both his methodological and substantive ideas 100 years from now.

Given James Heckman's enormous contributions to the field of economics and the social sciences more generally, the question regarding the Nobel prize was not “if,” but “when.” The choice of Heckman as the 2000 Nobel laureate (joint with Daniel McFadden, another deserving winner) has been warmly received throughout the profession. Heckman and McFadden were both pioneers whose work helped to create modern empirical economics.

Despite extensive debate, accounts of the Rule of Law remain strikingly vague and imprecise. This paper begins the task of remedying this situation through the development of an analytically rigorous theory of the Rule of Law. First, it offers a preliminary sketch of a concept of law; second, it shows how the principles traditionally associated with the Rule of Law can be intrinsically connected with this concept of law; and third, it shows how these principles place meaningful restrictions on what states can and cannot do. Further components of the overall project are gestured toward in the paper's conclusion. Apart from advancing the broader goal of developing a complete theory of the Rule of Law, a paper of even this limited scope will be helpful in imposing some much-needed conceptual discipline over the Rule of Law debate.

This paper analyzes the function acquired by the historical Nuremberg trial in the constitution of a specific discourse about transitional South Africa and about what should be done about the brutality of the past. This function is best described as mythical: emptied of content, Nuremberg was a blank slate on which all parties to the debate could write their conflicting representations of the situation and their respective proposed solutions. The organization of fundamentally incompatible representations of reality around unifying myths such as Nuremberg was key to the production of visible consensus on the proper evaluation of the sociopolitical situation and the basic characteristics of the right course of action, and thus the appearance of effective state administration in a reconciled nation.