ABSTRACT

Concerning normativity, legal theorists and philosophers tend to focus on the acts of norm creation but disregard normative experience. By contrast, Petrażycki’s theory of law offers an analysis of normative experience that reveals how normative phenomena occur in the human consciousness. In this chapter Lorenzo Passerini Glazel reconstructs Petrażycki’s notions of normative experience and norm through the phenomenological concepts of “deontic noesis” and “deontic noema.” He then discusses whether Petrażycki’s analysis can account for the fact that one may know a deontic noema (or a norm) without having a corresponding deontic noesis (or a normative experience), that is, one may imagine or know of the existence of a norm without subscribing to it.