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17 - Social-Practice Legal Positivism and the Normativity Thesis

from Part IV - Main Tenets

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 January 2021

By
Stefano Bertea
Edited by
Torben Spaak  and
Patricia Mindus
Torben Spaak
Affiliation:
Stockholms Universitet
Patricia Mindus
Affiliation:
Uppsala Universitet, Sweden
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Summary

Bertea considers two ways of understanding the social thesis, along the lines of either legal conventionalism or the conception of law as a shared activity, arguing that on neither interpretation of the social thesis can legal positivism account for the necessary normativity of law, that is, for the necessary capacity of law to impose (genuine) obligations and confer (genuine) rights on both officials and citizens. He points out that there are fundamentally two ways in which legal positivists conceptualise legal obligation – either as a genuine requirement set forth in the law or as a perspectival requirement – and that on the former conceptualisation, legal obligations will bind only those who are committed to the legal enterprise, that is, the officials, and that on the latter, they will bind only those who adopt the standpoint of the legal system itself. Further, he objects that on the former conceptualisation, legal positivism fails to account for legal obligations that apply to the citizens, and that on the latter interpretation, it turns out that law might not be necessarily normative in the first place.

Keywords

normativity thesislegal conventionalismsocial-practice legal positivismobligationlegal subjects

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The Cambridge Companion to Legal Positivism , pp. 397 - 418
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2021

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