Fictions, Lies, and the Authority of Law

Steven D. Smith, winner of the 2022 Religious Liberty Initiative Scholarship Award, is formerly the Warren Distinguished Professor of Law, co-executive director of the Institute for Law and Religion, and the co-executive director of the Institute for Law and Philosophy at the University of San Diego. He is the author of numerous books, including The Godless Constitution and the Providential Republic and The Disintegrating Conscience and the Decline of Modernity.

Prologue: The Puzzling (Alleged) Disappearance of Authority 1. The Fictional Foundations of (Modern) Political Authority 2. Fictional Authority and the Problem of Constitutional Interpretation 3. Our Quasi-Fictional Government 4. From Political Fictions to "Living with Lies" 5. Authority and Faux Authority 6. Is Genuine Authority Possible? Epilogue: Authority Outside the Cave?

"[This book's] intelligence, clarity, and candor make it a ?ne example of what a work of legal theory ought to be. Although legal authority has been much studied, Smith sheds new light on it." -The Review of Politics "As Smith argues, a good legal fiction must be both plausible and beneficial, else we have little reason to play along with it. But what makes the fiction plausible?" -Public Discourse "As he has so often in his previous work, Steven Smith leads us to see familiar concepts in a new light and brings to bear a wide range of disciplines to conversations about law and legal theory. In this work, our understanding of authority gets the Smith treatment, and the result is an imaginative and critical contribution to the literature on legal authority." -Michael P. Moreland, director of the Eleanor H. McCullen Center for Law, Religion and Public Policy, Villanova University "In this provocative and illuminating work, one of our most insightful legal thinkers explores the nature of real authority. Steven Smith reveals that a loss of authority would be far from liberating. Instead he offers a hopeful account of how genuine authority exists and provides us with a firm place on which to stand." -Richard Garnett, co-editor of First Amendment Stories "It is hard to break new ground in thinking about the nature and practice of authority, but Smith's book, with its introduction of the idea of a fiction into the existing understanding, does just that. And the book's careful and creative use of multiple philosophical and social science disciplines is an added and unusual benefit." -Frederick Schauer, author of The Force of Law