Ebook: Vienna Lectures on Legal Philosophy, Volume 2: Normativism and Anti-Normativism in Law

What is law? Is it a set of obligations imposed on courts and officials to guide their conduct and to assess the conduct of others; or is it the result of various, ever negotiable, settlements reached by contending forces that accept, for the time being, arrangements and understandings in order to sustain conditions of peaceful cooperation?
If law is the former, its import and meaning are independent of a shifting constellation of forces; if the latter, then what the law says depends on the relative power and prestige of the actors involved.
If scholars and practitioners believe that law imposes such obligations that demand allegiance, they are considered normativists. Alternatively, if they view legal constraints as transient arrangements between and among contending groups, they are not. Hardly any issue in contemporary legal philosophy is as controversial as the normativism/anti-normativism debate; while some believe law’s (claim to) ‘normativity’ to be at the very core of the concept of law, others brush it aside as a pseudo-problem, frequently discussed (and oftentimes resolved) in the history of legal thought.
The second volume of the Vienna Lectures on Legal Philosophy presents the positions of some of the leading scholars working on the problem and allows them to take a stand on the issue. In providing a forum of discussion for proponents and opponents alike, it allows for a nuanced assessment of a debate that all too often is led by one side without paying attention to the arguments of the other.