Can Hartian positivism adequately explain disagreements, among U.S. officials, about the correct method of statutory interpretation? Ronald Dworkin influentially argued it cannot. Dworkin maintained that (1) debates about the correct method of statutory interpretation are ‘theoretical’ disagreements; and (2) Hartian positivism cannot explain theoretical disagreements, except by positing implausible confusion or disingenuity on the part of legal officials. I show here that (1) is false. A disagreement about the correct method of statutory interpretation need not involve a theoretical disagreement of any kind. It may instead involve a purely ‘denotational’ disagreement among officials—i.e., a disagreement about the denotation of a concept appearing in a criterion of legal validity that all officials accept. I argue that, since the U.S. statutory interpretation debate plausibly is a purely denotational one, it does not pose the difficulties for Hartian positivism that Dworkin and other critics have supposed.

Ronald Dworkin’s argument from theoretical disagreement remains a pressing challenge for legal positivists. In this paper, I show how positivists can answer Dworkin’s argument without having to attribute confusion or disingenuity to legal officials. I propose that the argument rests on two errors. The first is to assume that positivism requires legal officials to converge on precise grounds of law when convergence on more general grounds will do. The second is to construe judicial speech too literally. If we pay attention to the pragmatics of judicial speech, we see that judges do not disagree over what the grounds of law are; they at most disagree over how courts should proceed when agreed-upon, though imprecise, grounds of law underdetermine what the content of the law directs in the case at hand.

In recent years, there has been renewed interest in the question of whether Ronald Dworkin was correct to allege that legal positivists are unable to account for theoretical disagreement about law. However, relatively little attention has been paid to the related question of who can best account for agreement about law. An important exception is Brian Leiter’s argument that there is massive and pervasive agreement in legal judgments and that positivism can account for this agreement but Dworkin cannot. In this article, I argue that Dworkin can account for such agreement, and that his explanation is no less straightforward than the positivist’s. I further contend that Leiter’s strategy for explaining theoretical disagreement is weakened once we recognise that Dworkin has a plausible explanation of agreement in legal judgments. I conclude by exploring how we might choose between the positivist’s and Dworkin’s competing explanations of agreement in legal judgments.