Basic Concepts of Law
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Of old, the analysis of central legal concepts has been an important part of general jurisprudence or legal theory. Looking back it has also been a central theme of my research, even to the extent that many of my favourite topics have returned in more than one paper, and not always - I must confess - for the reason that I had something new to say. I hope that the repetition in my output has at least broadened the readership for what I had to say. In this introduction I will list the concepts that I have discussed, and then I devote separate subsections to each of the concepts in which I mention the papers that address this concept.
So long ago that I cannot even remember the precise year anymore, my colleagues at the Leiden department for the Introduction to Law and I co-authored a teaching book called H. Franken (ed.), InLeiden tot de rechtswetenschap. I was given the opportunity to write the chapter on the validity of law, and this chapter, of course strongly modified in the course of years, still exists as chapter 15 of Introduction to Law (2017). While writing on the validity of law (de gelding van het recht), I discovered an ambiguity in the word 'validity', an ambiguity that does not exist in the Dutch or the German language. The Germans distinguish between 'Gueltichkeit' and 'Geltung', where the English use the word 'validity' for both. This discovery inspired me to write one of my first published papers Enkele opmerkingen over geldigheid en gelding (1984). The same topic, but strongly expanded in connection with soft law, returned in What is Legal Validity. Lessons from Soft Law (2018).
Another early paper was inspired by Alf Ross' article Tu-tu. In that article Ross tried to account for the meaning of the word 'ownership', while at the same time holding on to the view that ownership did not 'really' exist in the world. I wrote Enkele opmerkingen over de betekenis van statuswoorden in 1986, the year that I was finishing my PhD-thesis on facts and their meanings. On one hand, I was sympathetic to the view that things such as ownership did not exist objectively, that is: in a mind-independent world. On the other hand I believed that many, if not all, things are mind-dependent because they are carriers of meaning, and that ownership does in that respect not take an exceptional position. Perhaps, I thought, Ross' analysis of the meaning of words like ' ownership' could be spplied on a much larger scale. And that kindled my interest in status words. Status words stand for things that are identified by two factors: (1) the conditions for their existence, and (2) the consequences of their existence. This theme did not only play a role in my early publication of 1986, but also in the following papers:
Curiosity about the nature of the ought in judgments on what ought to be done andthe relation between this ought and (other) facts has been one of the driving factors behind my research. It should therefore not come as a surprise that I wrote many articles on ought-related topics. More specifically, I wrote about the nature of normativity, about the diversity of deontic concepts, about the nature of norms, about the (alleged) gap between Is and Ought, and about the logical relations between deontic notions. The following of my publications fit in this field of attention:
Acts play an important role in the law. Agents are responsible for their acts. If an act was unlawful (tortuous), it can lead to liability for damages. Some acts (juridical acts) can lead to legal consequences for the very reason that these consequences were intended. They give the agent the power to bring about these consequences. The requirement of intention makes juridical acts performed by computers a bit problematic. This also holds for holding computers responsible for their acts. To perform a juridical act, the agent needs the competence to do so. The following papers address these issues:
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