ABSTRACT
This chapter describes the idea of shared normative experiences and how thinking of the law in such terms may serve the project of legal pluralism. It uses Kelsen's legal philosophy as a springboard helping him to clarify his conceptualization of the law. The chapter focuses on the idea that the autonomous existence of the law is tied up to the emergence of certain conventions, which are historically contingent. So, to return to the central theme of this chapter, it considers the biggest challenge for legal theory to be explaining and dealing with the specificity of legality rather than accounting for the connection between the law and morality. But, more crucially for my purposes in this book, the main shortcoming of viewing the law as an application discourse is that it still presupposes the radical separation of legal normativity from reality, thus not explicating convincingly what makes the application of norms to real contexts possible at all.
