Sources of Law

Abstract

Oddly enough, very scant reference—if any—is made to the sources of law as a genuinely jurisprudential topic in contemporary legal philosophy. Yet, the jurisprudential import of the concept of ‘sources of law’ seems substantial: sources of law are what makes of something ‘a law’—a law is what is produced by, or derives from, a source of law. Sources epitomize the very ‘positivity’ of positive law, an aspect of law which is central to legal positivism of course, but whose importance not even a natural lawyer or an anti-positivist would ever deny. This essay highlights several jurisprudential questions that surround the sources of law, and tries to show they relate to–and contribute to illuminate–many long-debated jurisprudential topics such as the concept of legal validity, the notion and the conditions of existence of a legal system, the problem of legal change, and the scope of legal disagreements.