ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the problem of the normativity of law (the sense and the ways in which the law is ‘binding’, has ‘authority’, provides ‘reasons for action’), from the point of view of legal positivism. Over the last four decades, the topic of the normativity of law has become a central one in jurisprudential debates; many scholars in the philosophy of law have treated normativity as an essential property of the law, whose explanation has become an unavoidable task for jurisprudence. Much of this debate has revolved around the question if the law derives whatever normativity it has from morality, or rather if the law creates specifically ‘legal reasons’, distinct from moral as well as from prudential reasons. Giorgio Pino will argue that, in the course of any treatment of the topic of the normativity of law, a few conceptual distinctions are required in the first place – namely, a distinction between types of normativity, a distinction between types of reasons, and a distinction between different kinds of addresses of the law. Once such distinctions are carefully introduced, we will be able to see that there is nothing mysterious in the normativity of law, and that legal positivism is perfectly equipped to explain it.
