Necessity, Importance, and the Nature of Law

J. Ferrer Beltrán et al. (eds.), Neutrality and Theory of Law, Law and Philosophy Library 106, DOI 10.1007/978-94-007-6067-7_2, © Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2013 It is a commonplace among scholars of general jurisprudence that a central goal—perhaps the central goal, or perhaps even the only goal—of general jurisprudence is to use the tools of philosophical analysis as a way of helping us to “understand” the “nature of law.” 1 And although the question of what it is to “understand” some phenomenon is invariably a subjective and psychological determination, the object of that understanding—the “nature” of law—is not necessarily either subjective or psychological. Rather, the assumption in much contemporary writing on general jurisprudence is that the nature of the phenomenon of law has an observerindependent or theorist-independent existence, and that the task of the theorist is to discover and explain what that nature is. There is much that is controversial embedded in the foregoing paragraph, and I will take note of some of these controversies presently. My principal goal in this Chapter 2 Necessity, Importance, and the Nature of Law