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On legal theory -- . -Changing conceptions of organization -- . -What is an organization? -- . -The story of personless corporation -- . -A theory of organizations' rights -- . -Organizations' legal rights -- . -The expanding reach of judicial decisions -- . -The form of organizational adjudication -- . -Individual rights and the political structure of society -- . -The organizational conception of the state -- . -Organizations, position-holders, communities, and oversize bees.

Construction and revision -- Constructing subjects -- Socializing Harry -- Revising our pasts -- Regret, luck, and identity -- Value and humanity -- Individuals, citizens, persons -- Dignity and self-creation -- A morality of crime and punishment -- Collective subjects -- Collective personhoods -- Sanctioning corporations -- Freedoms of collective speech

In these writings by one of our most creative legal philosophers, Meir Dan-Cohen explores the nature of the self and its response to legal commands and mounts a challenge to some prevailing tenets of legal theory and the neighboring moral, political, and economic thought. The result is an insider's critique of liberalism that extends contemporary liberalism's Kantian strand, combining it with postmodernist ideas about the contingent and socially constructed self to build a thoroughly original perspective on some of the most vital concerns of legal and moral theory. Dan-Cohen looks first at t

The question whether to obey the law is not fundamentally different from the question whether to follow morality, or for that matter, the dictates of prudence. Morality, law, and prudence face the same normative challenge: they must confront and prevail over people's occurrent psychological impulses. These three branches of ethics differ only in the level of abstraction at which they address or rather constitute us: respectively, as human beings, members of the human race; as citizens, members of a particular political community; and as unique individuals. Our autonomy consists in subjecting impulse to norm in these various capacities. What does distinguish law in this regard is therefore not its normative appeal, but the fact that this appeal comes armed with coercion, thus distancing us from our role as citizens and fracturing the autonomy that following the law could otherwise display.

Two premises about ownership that contrast with prevailing views are developed from ordinary usage: (1) ownership can be valuable in its own right apart from the value of the object owned, & (2) ownership does not just label particular rights but more practically names a relationship to an object that forms the basis for claiming that ownership rights should exist. The owner's relation to object is an ontological one that is only partially & contingently related to ownership rights. This relationship resembles the relationship of a person to his/her body & is associated with the use of the personal pronouns I & me & the possessive pronouns my & mine. Concepts of value, pride, autonomy, status, & expressivity that enter into ownership & concepts of reference, allusion, & identity are discussed. Ownership provides surplus value beyond the value of the object itself because ownership value is one's own value extended to the object & implied in the use of the variant I(my) applied to the owned object. M. Pflum