ABSTRACT
The concept of guidance lies at the heart of normativity. It follows, according to the common view that the law necessarily claims to be normative, that guidance must play a central role in understanding the law. This article focuses on two questions about guidance: (i) what distinguishes normative guidance from non-normative guidance; and (ii) what is involved in using something as a reason and as a norm so that we are normatively guided by that something. In doing so, two features of how the law guides emerge: first, that despite the involvement of reasons, our relationship with the law is sometimes better characterised as non-normative guidance rather than normative guidance; and second, that it is a conceptual feature of what it is to use a legal directive as a norm that further practical reasoning is required to figure out what action that directive requires, independently of that directive’s vagueness or indeterminacy.
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Joshua Pike, How the Law Guides, Oxford Journal of Legal Studies, https://doi.org/10.1093/ojls/gqaa037. Published: 3 December 2020.
First posted 2020-12-07 19:15:04
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