This article attempts to illustrate the originality, depth, and farsightedness of Joseph Raz's conception, especially his idea that legal norms provide us with protected reasons to act, that is, with first-order reasons to behave as they prescribe, and with second-order, exclusionary reasons not to act for reasons against what they prescribe. But the article also highlights some aspects that raise doubts in my mind, especially with regard to the scope of these exclusionary reasons. This in two ways: by asking, on (...) the one hand, in what sense and subject to what limits legal norms provide exclusionary reasons for the organs entrusted with applying the law, especially for judges, and on the other hand, how and to what extent legal norms provide citizens with exclusionary reasons. So, in recognizing the strength of the Razian conception, the article also points to some of the difficulties it faces. (shrink)

Appeals to metaphysics have lately come to ascendancy in analytic legal philosophy. Over the last 20 years or so, a new discourse framework has emerged in analytic legal metaphysics that focusses on the explanatory question of how law is made. By any measure the most influential refinement of this question is to be found in Mark Greenberg's seminal 2004 article How Facts Make Law. This essay tries to exert some pressure on this familiar question by posing the categorial question of (...) what type of entities different theories of law take up as ontologically basic for their inquiry. The essay singles out four exemplary avenues for answering the categorial question. Introducing a categorial instead of explanatory lens is an overdue step in the process of updating the metaphysical toolbox of contemporary analytic theories of law. The categorial question of what kind of entity law is ismeant to complement the explanatory question of how law is made in a way that makes disagreements about the metaphysical-explanatory demands of theories of law more tractable or amenable to principled adjudication. (shrink)