Areas of Law: Three Questions in Special Jurisprudence
Oxford Journal of Legal Studies, Forthcoming
26 Pages Posted: 21 Sep 2022
Date Written: August 17, 2022
Abstract
This paper addresses three fundamental questions about a key phenomenon in special jurisprudence: ‘areas of law’: (i) what is an area of law; (ii) what are the consequences of dividing law into distinct areas; and (iii) what constitutes the foundations of an area of law. It claims that (i) “an area of law” is a set of legal norms which are intersubjectively recognised by the legal complex as a subset of legal norms in a given jurisdiction; (ii) the sub-division of law into multiple areas matters to the content and scope of legal doctrine, to law’s perceived legitimacy, and possibly to its effectiveness; and (iii) the search for the normative foundations of an area of law is typically an inquiry into its ‘aims’ or ‘functions’. The contribution of this paper is in systematically articulating, explaining, and answering these three questions generally, i.e. in relation to areas of law as such.
Keywords: special jurisprudence, areas of law, philosophical foundations, legal theory
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