ABSTRACT
Petrażycki characterizes legal life along two dimensions: the official/unofficial and the positive/intuitive. Regarding the first dimension, in this chapter Jacek Maria Kurczewski discusses psychological reductionism and argues that the distinction between official (or state) law and unofficial law also makes sense in the context of psychical experiences. He further argues that another type of legal phenomenon, “legal actions”—actions that amount to the intentional fulfillment of an obligation or to the exertion of a right—must be introduced. Official law remains latent as long as it exists at the legal-psychological level. It becomes actualized when a corresponding official legal action takes place. The same holds for unofficial law. As for the positive/intuitive dimension, Kurczewski shows that some legal emotions are “conditioned,” while others are experienced as spontaneous. These legal emotions constitute the positive and the intuitive components of legal consciousness, respectively.
