Law 2101 Study Guide - Quiz Guide: Presupposition, Pessimism, Federal Constitutional Court
Document Summary
The conceptual question: aims at insight into law s nature but not at answering the question what is to be done. Law consists of those rules that have been made, or at least are enforced, by the state. Hart s intention is to study the law as a social phenomenon in order to identify the general characteristics of this phenomenon. Secondary rules have as their function to organize the legal system itself. The law itself determines which rules are legal, mainly by pointing out who has the power to make legal rules. The only thing that hart claims is that modern legal systems in fact identify legal rules by means of the criterion whether these rules were created by somebody who had the legal competence to. Harts presupposition is that an adequate characterization of law can be given by having only eye for social practices and without dealing with normative issues.
