Continuing a prior rant with a bit of personal intellectual history:

I actually came to my present political-jurisprudential philosophy from an analysis of, of all people, Ronald Dworkin. I think Dworkin is mostly right that the positive law, in essence, rests on a substratum of morality which does more than just 'fill gaps,' contra positivism.

However, I disagree with Dworkin that the right answer to legal questions can come from true morality itself. As I wrote in one of my SSRN articles--whose true morality? It's not like any of us have unprivileged access to the Good.

That's the puzzle I set out to solve when i was working on my LLM thesis circa 2013.

But if we don't have access to true morality itself, insofar as we are all members of a shared political and moral community, we all have more-or-less direct access to a shared body of norms, traditions, and institutions...

On the Ancient Greek understanding of poletia (constitution, form of government, or however you wish to translate it), it is *exactly this shared heritage which defines who we are as a political community.* You see this in Plato. You see it in Aristotle.

The question then emerges what happens when we move away from the shared tradition--to political and moral questions which cannot be answered through our (God help me) 'overlapping consensus' on values. And that's where the engagement with literature on sovereignty comes from.

And it's engagement with that literature, on what everyone from Han Fei to Jeremy Bentham has had to say about the need to proffer authoritative resolutions to deep societal controversies, that I've been buried in for about three years now.

Point being: Just *maybe* some of us who come to unorthodox views aren't disaffected young men, but scholars who have devoted their professional lives to exploring a set of fundamental philosophical questions which are at the heart of the western philosophical tradition.

End rant.