Properties of Law
Modern Law and After

The book relates the normativity of law to law's internal sociality and shows the multi-layered nature of legal normativity.

Kaarlo Tuori (Author)

9781108948807, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 6 April 2023

314 pages
24.4 x 17 x 1.7 cm, 0.507 kg

Properties of Law is a legal-theoretical analysis about modern state law; about sociality, normativity and plurality as its properties, and what will come after modern state law. The main objective of this study is to offer a legal theoretical recapitulation of modern state law that avoids the fallacies of Legal Positivism. This calls for a relationist approach where law's sociality is related to normativity, and normativity to sociality. Avoiding Legal Positivism's fallacies also includes refraining from extrapolating from modern state law to law in general; replacing Legal Positivism's conceptual universalism with sensitivity to the varieties of law, and acknowledging that law existed before modern state law, that it will exist after modern state law, and that other law exists alongside modern state law. The book concludes with a discussion of the impact of digitalization on law.

Part I. Sociality: 1. Return of the repressed
2. Social practices
3. Socio-legal practices
4. Specialized legal practices
5. Legal discourse
Part II. Normativity: 6. Specificities of legal normativity
7. Layers of law
8. Orders of law
9. Morality of law
10. Constitution
Part III. Plurality: 11. The black-box view
12. Non-state law
13. From simple diversity to interlegality and pluralism
14. Unity under post-national plurality
Epilogue: Incertitude.

Subject Areas: Constitutional & administrative law [LND], Systems of law [LAF], Jurisprudence & philosophy of law [LAB], Social & political philosophy [HPS]