ABSTRACT
Joseph Raz is the foremost theorist in contemporary English-language analytical jurisprudence. This chapter investigates discussions of 'necessity' in jurisprudence, with particular emphasis on theories of the nature of law, and on the work of Raz. It considers a different line of criticism of conceptual analysis in jurisprudence — that there is no single concept of law — and also evaluates how a similar critique might apply to Raz's view. Conceptual analysis is certainly nothing new for jurisprudence either: arguably the most important jurisprudential text published in English in the last century was described by its title as being about a concept, H. L. A. Hart's The Concept of Law. Ludwig Wittgenstein famously introduced the notion of 'family resemblance' as a shorthand for the way that some concepts and categories cannot be understood in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions, but rather have a variety of different and overlapping criteria.
