Massimo La Torre

A permanent approach to what law is has been that of interpreting it in terms of repression or reduction of chances or courses of conduct. This approach, however, is not able to render justice to fundamental moments of the legal practice, beginning with constitutional law and its empowering rules. Nonetheless, the mainstream in the philosophy of law and in the legal theory has not at all been worried about this strange inadequacy of imperativism to offer a complete view of legal practice and legal institutions. Force, violence, sanction, prescription still are the basic conceptual knots used to weave the cloth of law and lawyers. Hannah Arendt perceptive though scanty remarks on law, within her wider reflections on action and judgment, offer a different view and open a new path for a jurisprudence less obsessed with coercion, and against the tradition supporting the centrality of command in the tlegal domain. Such view and that path this paper tries sympathetically to explore

This article provides an assessment of the merits of recent theories of legal reasoning. After a quick historical aperçu a number of models of legal argumentation are presented and discussed, with an eye to their mutual connection. An initial conclusion is that universalizability and discursivity are the common features of those models. The focal question dealt with, however, is that of the impact of the argumentative paradigms of adjudication on the very concept of law. Here the contention is that an argumentative style of reasoning contributes to rendering the structure of the law itself and its operations argumentative as well. By so doing the latter are—so to say—civilized and made less truculent. They will thus be able to develop more in conformity with a democratic form of life.

This is an attempt to conceptualize freedom beyond the now traditional opposition beetween a negative and a positive notion. To this purpose several weaknesses of the idea of negative freedom are pointed out and taken into account, while positive freedom is reinterpreted in terms of a social capacity, without reference however to romantic self-affirmation. Freeedom is thus seen connected with the question of power and authority, whose main theories are then shortly assessed. Among these the so-called „service conception“ is the object of a more detailed discussion. The outcome will be a proposal to make it possible to understand freedom as a special enabling position with regard to authority.

Le droit est traditionnellement lié à la pratique du commandement et de la hiérarchie. Il semble qu’une règle juridique établisse une immédiate relation entre une norme supérieure et une norme inférieure. La conception hiérarchique et impérative peut néanmoins être remise en cause dès lors que la phénoménologie de la règle juridique est appréhendée d’un point de vue interne, celui de ceux que l’on peut considérer comme les « utilisateurs » de la règle plutôt que ceux qui la subissent. Une approche tournée vers la pratique pourrait, de cette façon, conduire à une théorie du droit plus ouverte et, d’une certaine façon, moins idéologique ou sectaire. C’est – comme le défend cet article – le programme ou mieux la promesse que l’on trouve dans l’ouvrage principal de Hart, le Concept de droit. Cet article tente de rendre cette promesse plus transparente sans toutefois dissimuler les difficultés de sa stratégie narrative et argumentative

This paper discusses some models purported to legitimise a European supranational legal order. In particular, the author focuses on an application of the so‐called regulatory model to the complex structure of the European Community and the European Union. First of all, he tackles the very concept of legitimacy, contrasting it with both efficacy and efficiency. Secondly, he summarises the most prominent positions in the long‐standing debate on the sources of legitimation for the European Community. Thirdly, in this perspective, he analyses several, sometimes contradictory, notions of the rule of law. His contention is that we can single out five fundamental notions of the rule of law and that some but not all of them are incompatible with or oppose democracy. Finally, the paper addresses the regulatory model as a possible application of the rule of the law to the European supranational order. The conclusion is that the regulatory model should be rejected if it is presented as an alternative to classical democratic thought, though it might be fruitful if reshaped differently and no longer assessed from a functionalist standpoint of deliberation.