ABSTRACT
This chapter is concerned with the notion of a rule of recognition and that of a practice or convention. Efforts to overcome 'legal positivism' in modern jurisprudential thought have often, similarly, focused on a rejection of the idea of a rule of recognition. Positivism and idealism represent not only competing political visions, but also powerful centrifugal forces in legal thought. The legal thinking of any particular time-period in modern history will be characterised by the centrality it gives to one of these perspectives at the expense of the other. The chapter demonstrates that a dynamic tension exists between the notions of recognition and construction, for there can be no possibility of treating legality as an object of 'pure' recognition or 'pure' construction. Thus, the intellectual difficulties faced by legal positivism, are in fact shared by idealism in virtue of the embeddedness within both traditions of certain epistemological assumptions.
