Laws as Conventional Norms

Abstract

A persistent worry concerning conventiona list accounts of law is that such accounts are ill equipped to account for law's special normativity. The chapter offers a particular kind of conventiona list account that is based on the practice-dependent account of conventional norms the author has offered elsewhere and considers whether it is vulnerable to the Normativity Objection. The chapter argues that it isn't. It can account for all the ways in which law can justly claim to be normative. While there are ways of being normative that it cannot account for, it is an error to suppose that law is normative in any of those ways.

Keywords: law, normativity, normativity of law, norms, conventions, legal norms, conventional norms, conventionalism, descriptive jurisprudence, legal positivism