After two decades of decline and indifference in the Anglo-American world, the subject of taxing inherited wealth has recently begun to resurface. In the past five years, the number of books and articles on the topic has shown a noticeable increase. And in Ontario, Canada’s most populous and industrialized province, the unexpected election of the New Democratic Party in September 1991, promising to reintroduce a provincial succession duty, has put the issue back on the political agenda.

In an interesting and thoughtful book The Economy of the Earth: Philosophy, Law and the Environment, Mark Sagoff provides us with a sustained critique of the methods used by economists to inform environmental policy and regulation. He debunks the relevance of the efficiency criterion in particular, even when it is supplemented with a concern for equity, and argues that environmental problems are better analyzed in moral, aesthetic, cultural, and political terms. To make this argument, Sagoff relies on four key distinctions. These distinctions, which overlap to some extent, are drawn between: (1) the citizen and the consumer, (2) values and preferences, (3) public and private interests, and (4) virtues and methods.

One of the assumptions of our legal system is that when a violation of law has occurred, we (society) should provide a remedy for individuals who were harmed. More specifically, we should provide them with corrective remedies—remedies that place them as nearly as possible in the position they would be in if no wrong had occurred. This principle is not universal. There are legal wrongs, usually statutory, for which only public officials can seek a judicial remedy. And where private remedies do apply, not all the effects of a legal wrong are covered. But in general, individuals who have suffered legal wrongs are entitled to remedies that relieve the effects of the wrong and return them to their “rightful position.”

There are many, purportedly competing, theories about law and about aspects of legal practice. H.L. A. Hart, in perhaps the most famous contemporary account, explains law in terms of primary and secondary rules. Writers within the American legal realist tradition believe rules cannot adequately explain legal practice and look instead to actual decisions. This view is reflected in Oliver Wendell Holmes’ famous definition of law as “the prophecies of what the courts will do in fact.” Ronald Dworkin theorizes that posited rules cannot account for the innumerable disputes about the law and argues that political morality plays an important role in conceptualizing law. These theories variously explain law in terms of (a) posited rules, (b) judicial decisions and not rules, and (c) legal rules and moral rights. This sampling of “rival” theories typifies the current state of jurisprudence: a plethora of apparently competing and seemingly endlessly debated theories about law. Ruth Gavison suggests that much jurisprudential discussion has been “sterile and barren” because theorists often have not appreciated the plurality of purposes for theorizing about law and, consequently, the extent to which putatively contradictory accounts of law are at cross purposes or complementary.

In Law’s Empire, Ronald Dworkin combines his role as a legal theorist with his role as a political theorist. He sets forth a view of jurisprudence and law as modes or fields of interpretation, and he likewise propounds the notion that our current law can best be interpreted as a system pointing to the ideal of equality-of-resources. Nowhere does Dworkin’s combination of views emerge more piquantly than within his chapter entitled “The Common Law.” There Dworkin grants that much of English and American common law has had the effect of simulating markets—in other words, the effect of allocating productive forces in ways that would have come about via costless bargains among all relevant people. But he disputes the added thesis that the judicial simulation should be interpreted as the maximizing of wealth. Pitting himself against the economic approach to legal matters, Dworkin holds that we can best understand market-simulation as the achievement or pursuit of equality.

In the past half century most legal philosophy has been limited to a fairly narrow range of traditional topics such as adjudication, legal reasoning, interpretation, legal persons, obligation and authority, the possibility of legal knowledge, the relationship of law to power, morality, economics and class struggle, and positivism vs. natural law. For those of us comfortable in the tradition, the range of questions appeared to outline an intellectually and politically adequate domain. The basic problems fell neatly into the major philosophical departments of epistemology, logic, value theory and, in some cases, metaphysics, and allowed participation by everyone along the political spectrum from the radical Marxist left through the liberal center to the fascist right.