Coleman’s book is clear, philosophically ambitious, and densely argued. It therefore provides a useful occasion to inspect the state of legal positivism three decades after the challenge he treats as catalytic. Have any of the subsequent formulations of legal positivism succeeded in reconciling that theory with actual legal practice? If so, which formulation is most successful? I shall argue that the arguments Coleman advances, and those he attributes to other positivists, are not successful. Exclusive positivism, at least in Raz‘s version, is Ptolemaic dogma: it deploys artificial conceptions of law and authority whose only point seems to be to keep positivism alive at any cost. Inclusive positivism is worse: it is not positivism at all, but only an attempt to keep the name “positivism” for a conception of law and legal practice that is entirely alien to positivism. If I am right in these harsh judgments, a further question arises. Why are legal positivists so anxious to defend positivism when they can find no successful arguments for it? I shall later offer what I believe to be at least part of the answer: positivists are drawn to their conception of law not for its inherent appeal, but because it allows them to treat legal philosophy as an autonomous, analytic, and self-contained discipline.

(Ronald Dworkin, “Thirty Years On,” review of The Practice of Principle: In Defense of a Pragmatist Approach to Legal Theory, by Jules Coleman, Harvard Law Review 115 [April 2002]: 1655-87, at 1656)