Ethics

I've written about the Holmesian bad man stance, i.e. the notion that the reason-giving force of a law is entirely a matter of the desire of a citizen to avoid sanctions.  H.L.A. Hart's idea of the internal aspect of rules is an attempt to ground the normativity of law in something other than the fear of punishment.  As someone who is interested in this subject, I like to collect examples of Holmesian bad man reasoning when people are honest enough to admit that they really don't give a hoot about the law as such, but are only interested in not getting caught.  I never expected, however, to hear a statement like this from a former United States Attorney General:

We should have abandoned the idea of removing the U. S. attorneys once the Democrats took the Senate. Because at that point we could really not count on Republicans to cut off investigations or help us at all with investigations. We didn't see that at the Department of Justice. Nor did the White House see that. Karl didn't see it. If we could do something over again, that would be it.

That is from Alberto Gonzales's interview in Esquire magazine (h/t TPM). While there may be room for jurisprudential debate over whether ordinary citizens are obligated to take the internal perspective on law (which is what I argue for in the paper linked above), I would have thought it beyond dispute that the nation's top law enforcement official, who also advises the President on the legality of government actions, would be required to comply with the law just because it's the law, not because there might be investigations and penalties if the Justice Department was caught violating the law.