the legislature). As Dworkin says, He knows that other judges have decided cases that, although not exactly like his case, deal with related problems; he must think of their decisions as part of a long story he must interpret and then continue, according to his own judgment of how to make the developing story as good as it can be. The answer to the question âwhat is law?â is always a fact. Several schools of thought have developed around the nature of law, the most influential of which are: In recent years, debates about the nature of law have become increasingly fine-grained. It adopts a constructive approach in that it seeks to improve our lives and our community. He must, in other words, find the answer that best âfitsâ and explains the practice of chess. Instead, they find such justification in the justice or efficiency or other virtue of the exercise of such coercion by a judge. As John Austin describes the project, analytic jurisprudence seeks “the essence or nature which is common to all laws that are properly so called” (Austin 1995, p. 11). Dworkin claims that, while rules âare applicable in an all-or-nothing fashionâ, principles and policies have âthe dimension of weight or importanceâ. Nor, secondly, does Raz accept that the content of law cannot be determined exclusively by social facts: so, for example, since courts unavoidably rely on explicitly moral considerations, they creep into determinations of what the law actually is. His constructive vision of law is both a profound analysis of the concept of law and a compelling entreaty in support of its enrichment. [5] Analytical jurisprudence aims to define what law is and what it is not by identifying law's essential features. As we saw in the last chapter, legal positivists are generally content with the fact that the rule of recognition stipulates that X is law. Kelsen does concede that the law consists also of legal acts as determined by these norms. Raz accepts only the âsocial thesisâ on the basis of the three accepted criteria by which a legal system may be identified: its efficacy, its institutional character, and its sources. The statement is not a positive norm â i.e. In a hard case the judge therefore draws on principles, including his own conception of the best interpretation of the system of political institutions and decisions of his community. If, however, there is more to law than rules, as Dworkin claims, then an answer may be found in the law itself. 1931) who in 1969 succeeded H. L. A. Hart as Professor of Jurisprudence at Oxford. not a norm posited by a real act of will â but a norm presupposed in a believerâs thinking. The first maintains that determining what the law requires in a particular case necessarily involves a form of interpretative reasoning. Law school textbooks and legal encyclopedias represent this type of scholarship. His major justification for the sources thesis is that it accounts for a primary function of law: the setting of standards by which we are bound, in such a way that we cannot excuse our non-compliance by challenging the rationale for the standard. In addition to analytic jurisprudence, legal philosophy is also concerned with normative theories of law. Since, by definition, the validity of the basic norm cannot depend on any other norm, it has to be presupposed. Normative jurisprudence investigates both the non-legal norms that shape law and the legal norms that are generated by law and guide human action.[5]. Semantic theories contest the claim that there are universal standards that exhaust the conditions for the proper application of the concept of law. The pedigree of a rule is thus conclusive of its validity. A chess grand master distracts his opponent by continually smiling at him. In reaching this conclusion, he repudiates three common arguments made for the moral authority of law. Pragmatists, according to Dworkin, adopt a sceptical attitude towards the view that past political decisions justify state coercion. âSoftâ positivists, like H. L. A. Hart, reject this view, and acknowledge that content or merit may be included or incorporated as a condition of validity. His model of a legal system is therefore a succession of interconnected norms advancing from the most general âoughtsâ (e.g. The principal objective of analytic jurisprudence has traditionally been to provide an account of what distinguishes law as a system of norms from other systems of norms, such as ethical norms. This is the basic norm or Grundnorm. In the 1980s Dworkin advanced a more radical thesis that law was essentially an interpretive phenomenon. It constitutes the basic norm of a religious morality, the norm that grounds the validity of all the norms of that morality â a âbasicâ norm, because no further question can be raised about the basis of its validity. The foundations of legal philosophy were shaken in the 1970s by the ideas of the American jurist, Ronald Dworkin (b. The writing of the Oxford philosopher, Joseph Raz (b. Thus the judge must apply standards other than rules. A âpolicyâ, however, is âthat kind of standard that sets out a goal to be reached, generally an improvement in some economic, political, or social feature of the communityâ. Nor can the validity of a positive legal order be denied merely because of the content of its norms.