Concluding Thoughts: Autonomy, Self-Containment, and Self-Sufficiency

The final chapter continues to refine the book’s account of legal scholarship as a source of law by considering putative features of sources of law that were not explicitly discussed in earlier chapters, namely, autonomy, self-containment, and self-sufficiency. The chapter argues that where legal scholarship is treated as a source of law, it is treated as an autonomous, but not self-contained and not self-sufficient, source of law. While making this argument the chapter offers a reply to objections that have been advanced by two critics of the first edition of the book.