ABSTRACTAs the title suggests, I take up three motifs in the article. Legal science, on a narrower reading, examines the law qua object of legal cognition. Substituting legal cognition for traditio...

The concept of legal power is important in the law since, with regard to actions having legal effect, the “exercise of legal power” delimits those actions for which manifestation of intention to achieve a legal effect is essential for the effect to ensue. The paper proposes a definition that captures this feature of legal power and marks it off from “direct effect,” as well as from permissibility and practical ability to achieve the legal effect. This analysis of power is limited (...) to the “immediate” legal power of a physical person characterized by the power-holder achieving a legal result by the power-holder's own behaviour. It is argued that in the literature on power the concept of legal power is frequently construed in such a way that it becomes either too broad or too narrow. (shrink)

We extend the monotonic and regular modal logics to the multi-modal cue, and give semantical characterization w.r.t. a semantics of minimal frames. For this we introduce a calculus over neighbourhoods and we obtain simpler conditions than those from the literature.

The author discusses a number of issues in the theory of legal sources. The first topic is whether sources should be conceived of as acts or texts. The alternatives are connected with two competing theories of legal interpretation (viz., the cognitive theory and the sceptical theory), which entail different concepts of legal rules and law‐making. The second topic is whether a “formal” or a “material” criterion of recognition of sources should be preferred. The third section is devoted to the analysis (...) of rules of change. Four theories of rules of change are discussed, and five kinds of such rules are distinguished. The fourth section concerns judicial law‐making, with special reference to the creation of new legal rules by constitutional courts. (shrink)

In this paper, we investigate the ‘ought implies can’ thesis, focusing on explanations and interpretations of OIC, with a view to clarifying its uses and relevance to legal philosophy. We first review various issues concerning the semantics and pragmatics of OIC; then we consider how OIC may be incorporated in Hartian and Kelsenian theories of the law. Along the way we also propose a taxonomy of OIC-related claims.

Presenting the first comprehensive, in-depth study of hyperintensionality, this book equips readers with the basic tools needed to appreciate some of current and future debates in the philosophy of language, semantics, and metaphysics. After introducing and explaining the major approaches to hyperintensionality found in the literature, the book tackles its systematic connections to normativity and offers some contributions to the current debates. The book offers undergraduate and graduate students an essential introduction to the topic, while also helping professionals in related (...) fields get up to speed on open research-level problems. (shrink)

In order to design and implement electronic institutions that incorporate norms governing the behavior of the participants of those institutions, some crucial steps should be taken. The first problem is that human norms are (on purpose) specified on an abstract level. This ensures applicability of the norms over long periods of time in many different circumstances. However, for an electronic institution to function according to those norms, they should be concrete enough to be able to check them run time. A (...) second problem is that norms describe which behavior is desirable and permitted, but not how this is achieved in an institution. In the “real world" regulations often indicate procedures for implementing and enforcing the law. Likewise we should devise means to annotate the norms with practical aspects such as enforcement mechanisms, sanctions, etc. in order to get requirements for an institution that will enforce norms (by either constraining behavior within the norms or reacting to violation of the norms). The choice of which kind of mechanism is chosen is not a normative one, but usually based on criteria of efficiency and/or feasibility of the mechanism. In this paper we present our view on how to approach these problems and other related issues to be solved in order to develop e-institutions capable to operate in complex, highly regulated scenarios. (shrink)

This dissertation addresses the issues of the indeterminacy of law and judicial discretion in the decision of the quaestio facti. It is composed of four papers: In the first paper, I develop an account of legal indeterminacy called the ‘systemic indeterminacy’ thesis. This thesis claims that legal indeterminacy and judicial discretion are the results of features of the structure of typical rational legal systems such as interpretative codes with a plurality of interpretative directives, the non-redundancy clause, and the non-liquet rule. (...) In the second paper, I criticise two approaches that support the thesis that law ought to ascertain the truth of the quaestio facti: the motivation approach and the legal approach. First, I advance two objections to a version of the motivation approach that I call the ‘behaviour-guidance’ theory. The first objection claims that the appearance of ascertaining the truth is enough to produce the psychological state of compliance. The second objection claims that the indeterminacy of law brings about the impossibility of an ex ante knowledge of the content of the law, thus, the governed cannot gain knowledge of the law’s efforts to ascertain the truth. Second, I explore if the legal approach is plausible. I provide five different legal reasons to support the claim that the law ought to ascertain the truth of the quaestio facti. However, I show that none of these reasons are particularly convincing. In the third paper, I advance three objections to the idea of reducing the indeterminacy of the standard of proof rules by adding new legal rules for their interpretation. The first objection claims that these interpretative rules, do not provide any guidance to the trier of fact to set the quantum of evidence. The second objection claims that insofar as these interpretative rules are posited in a natural language they are also indeterminate. The third objection claims that these interpretative rules are redundant legal rules. In the fourth paper, I develop the thesis that standards of proof are competence norms that grant competence to triers of fact to set the quantum of evidence in a case-by-case manner. (shrink)

This paper aims to explore two objections raised against Bulygin’s second approach to the definition of the nature of legal power-conferring rules. According to the first objection, such an account is vague about what is defined by legal power-conferring rules qua constitutive rules. I maintain that this vagueness is rooted in the lack of a suitable definition of legal power. I shall be arguing for the reduction of the complexity of the definientia by defining legal power as a species of (...) competence. According to the second objection, this non-reductive approach cannot explain the normativity of this kind of rules. Against this approach, it argues that legal powerconferring rules perform a deontic and a definitional function as constitutive rules of legal practice. (shrink)