What Does Law Claim?

According to Joseph Raz, law, by its nature, claims to be a moral authority (though he also argued that law often fails to justify that claim). There is an obvious attraction to Raz’s position: it seems to make sense of legal officials telling us what to do, and many individuals seeming to believe that they should do what the law says just because the law says so. This chapter first briefly considers why some theorists are troubled by the assertion that law claims—that it claims anything. Those commentators argue that law is not the sort of thing that should be said to be making claims. However, given that we attribute claims or actions to other or collective bodies, the idea of law’s claims should not concern us unduly. The chapter’s main focus is evaluating the competing views, that legal propositions must be understood in moral terms (as Raz’s approach appears to do), and that legal propositions should be understood as empirical predictions of official action (as some American legal realists assert). The third alternative presented here portrays law as offering a sui generis form of normativity. Legal rules simply create “legal obligations” and give us “legal reasons” to act in specified ways. This alternative faces its own set of challenges, some of which are outlined.