Unpacking Normativity: Conceptual, Normative, and Descriptive Issues

This book provides a new and wide-ranging study of law's normativity, examining conceptual, descriptive and empirical dimensions of this perennial philosophical issue. It also contains essays concerned with, among other issues, normativity from a psychoanalytic point of view; the relationship between semantic and legal normativity; the treatment of normativity from a sociological point of view; and normativity as it pertains to transnational law.

The contributors come not only from the usual Anglo-American and Western European community of legal theorists, but also from Latin American and Eastern European communities, representing a diversity of perspectives and points of view – including essays from both analytic and continental methodologies. Given the various topics addressed in the proposed volume, it will appeal to scholars in transnational law, legal sociology, normative legal philosophy concerned with problems of state legitimacy and practical rationality, as well of those working in general jurisprudence. It promises a highly important contribution to the study of law's normativity.