ABSTRACT
This chapter starts with a definite legal system based upon a definite economic foundation as it appears at a given moment of history. It refrains from analysing the questions as to how the norms originate which make up the legal institutions, how a legal norm grows from its economic background, and what are the economic causes of the creation of legal norms. The chapter examines the economic and social effect of the valid norm as it exists. A number of distinct legal institutions serves a single economic process. Every economic process which in theory is an isolated unit is only part of the whole process of social production and reproduction. If the economic function is related to this whole, it becomes the social function of the legal institution. Within the economic structure economic process and legal norm appear as the same thing: the former seen as an external, technico-natural event, the latter as an inherent relation of wills.
