ABSTRACT
The problem of social pluralism pervades the legal system. Some of the relevant disagreements are explicitly religious in character. Others might be described as quasi-religious in the sense that they involve people's deepest and most defining commitments. Incompletely theorized agreements play a pervasive role in law and society. The argument emphatically applies to legal rules, whether set down by judges, legislators, or administrators. Legal rules are typically incompletely theorized in the sense that they can be accepted by people who disagree on many general issues. Incompletely theorized agreements do not offer such accounts. The Commission reached an incompletely theorized agreement on the value of starting with past averages. There is an association between the effort to attain incompletely theorized agreements and the rule of law ideal. Agreement is important, but disagreement is important too, for it can be a creative force in revealing error and injustice. Incompletely theorized agreements should therefore be subject to scrutiny over time.
