ABSTRACT
In this chapter, Michel Troper explores the structure of the legal system and its relationship with the emergence of the State. He first asks: What is the influence of legal practice on the law itself? If, by law, we understand merely a set of rules, and by legal practice the behavior that leads to the production or the application of those rules, then the answer is ‘none’, but the law is much more than a set of rules. When we teach law, we also describe all sorts of theories that lawmakers and lawyers use to justify, interpret and apply the rules and these theories are not all derived from other theories, from religious, political or economic doctrines, imported from outside the legal system, and formalized in the law. There is also the possibility that some theories including some that are constitutive of the legal system are being constructed as a result of constraints born out of legal practices. In this chapter, he explores that possibility, using the example of the theory of the State and the related concept of Sovereignty emerging from the practice of the hierarchization of norms.
