  There is also a difference between the authority of a law and its desirability: a legal order that its subjects disapprove of might have difficulty sustaining itself. The difference is conceptual as well as practical. Oakeshott joins legal positivists in distinguishing the validity of a law as law (which he calls its “authenticity”) from its desirability or justice (its “rightness”). But as his vocabulary signals, there are subtle distinctions that he finds important. In a civil association, a law is authentic if it is the outcome of an authoritative procedure for enacting or otherwise recognizing it as part of the legal order. This leaves open questions about its utility, moral legitimacy, conformity to some standard of fair distribution, or other qualities that might bear on its desirability. For Oakeshott, the rightness of a law (or as he puts it, the jus of lex) is not a matter of its consequences. He does not agree with John Rawls, Ronald Dworkin, or other liberal egalitarians that the rightness of a law (which they call justice) depends on whether it fairly distributes benefits and burdens (OH 156). Nor does he agree that it depends on criteria that Lon Fuller (1969) calls the “inner morality” of law, which requires among other things that laws be public, general, and not retroactive. These are qualities not of justice but of legality, Oakeshott argues. A law that is secret, tailored to benefit or injure particular individuals, or designed to punish acts performed before its enactment is a disguised command, not a genuine legal rule (OHC 128). He also disagrees with those who think that a law’s rightness depends on its conformity with a higher law, whether divine or natural, with principles of human rights, or with any other universal and categorical standard (OHC 174; OH 142). 