Law as an Artifact

ISBN: 9780198821977 出版年：2018 页码：305 Oxford University Press

The thesis that law is an artifact has several implications: that the instantiations of law have authors and are intentionally created, that law has a function, that law is a special type of artifact, i.e. an institutional, abstract, public and social artifact, and that law cannot exist if it is not socially efficacious. The inquires into the artifactual character of law that reveal these implications seem to have some potential payoffs for the understanding of law (e.g., of the dynamic character of law, contingency of the concept of law and law's properties, and normativity of law) and of our epistemic relation to law (e.g., of the immunity from massive error about what law is). They also seem to have an impact on the jurisprudential methodology (e.g., by directing us to non- essentialist ontological inquires into law, emphasizing the functional explanation of law and the need to combine conceptual analysis and experimental philosophy, and opening up the possibility for the project of prescribing conceptual revision) and to accommodate some of the seemingly opposed insights of the current theories of law (e.g., by accounting in a coherent way for both the objectivity of law and its effectiveness).