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This volume assembles leading scholars to examine how their respective theoretical positions relate to the artifactual nature of law. It offers a complete analysis of what is ontologically entailed by the claim that law - including legal systems, legal norms, and legal institutions - is an artifact, and what consequences, if any, this claim has for philosophical accounts of law.
Examining the artifactual nature of law draws attention to the role that intention, function, and action play in the ontological structure of law, and how these attributes interact with rules. It puts the role of author and authorship at the center of its analysis of legal ontology, and widens the scope that functional analysis can legitimately have in legal theory, emphasizing how the content of law depends on how it is used. Furthermore, the appeal to artifacts brings to the fore questions about the significance of concepts for the existence of law, and makes available new tools for legal interpretation. The notion of artifactuality offers a starting point from which to approach the basic dilemma of whether it is meaningful to search for essential, necessary, and sufficient features of law, a question that in current legal theory is put when deciding what kind of enterprise legal theory is from a methodological point of view, namely whether it is descriptive or prescriptive. This volume unearths insights and observations of value to all those looking to deepen their understanding of how the law is understood and experienced.
List of contents
- 1: Brian Leiter: Legal Positivism about the Artifact Law: A Retrospective Assessment
- 2: Frederick Schauer: Law as a Malleable Artifact
- 3: Andrei Marmor: Law, Fiction, and Reality
- 4: Corrado Roversi: On the Artifactual - and Natural - Character of Legal Institutions
- 5: Luka Burazin: Legal Systems as Abstract Institutional Artifacts
- 6: Kenneth Einar Himma: The Conceptual Function of Law: Law, Coercion, and Keeping the Peace
- 7: Kenneth Ehrenberg: Law is an Institution, an Artifact, and a Practice
- 8: Giovanni Tuzet: A Strange Kind of Artifact
- 9: Dan Priel: Not All Law Is an Artifact: Jurisprudence Meets the Common Law
- 10: Kevin Toh: Law, Morality, Art, the Works
- 11: Veronica Rodriguez-Blanco: Processes and Artifacts: The Principles are in the Author Herself
- 12: Brian Bix: Obligations from Artifacts
About the author
Luka Burazin is an assistant professor at the University of Zagreb.
Kenneth Einar Himma is a Continuing Visiting Professor at the Faculty of Law, University of Belgrade.
Corrado Roversi is an assistant professor at the University of Bologna.
Summary
This volume assembles leading scholars to examine how their respective theoretical positions relate to the artifactual nature of law. It offers a complete analysis of what is ontologically entailed by the claim that law - including legal systems, legal norms, and legal institutions - is an artifact, and what consequences, if any, this claim has for philosophical accounts of law.
Examining the artifactual nature of law draws attention to the role that intention, function, and action play in the ontological structure of law, and how these attributes interact with rules. It puts the role of author and authorship at the center of its analysis of legal ontology, and widens the scope that functional analysis can legitimately have in legal theory, emphasizing how the content of law depends on how it is used. Furthermore, the appeal to artifacts brings to the fore questions about the significance of concepts for the existence of law, and makes available new tools for legal interpretation. The notion of artifactuality offers a starting point from which to approach the basic dilemma of whether it is meaningful to search for essential, necessary, and sufficient features of law, a question that in current legal theory is put when deciding what kind of enterprise legal theory is from a methodological point of view, namely whether it is descriptive or prescriptive. This volume unearths insights and observations of value to all those looking to deepen their understanding of how the law is understood and experienced.
