Entailed norms and legal systems

NAVARRO, PABLO Y RODRIGUEZ, JORGE

Logic in the Theory and Practice of Lawmaking

Springer

Lugar: New York, London, etc; Año: 2015; p. 97 - 114

The validity within legal systems of entailed norms, that is, those normsthat are logically derivable from explicitly issued rules, has been calledinto question with different arguments. To take two examples fromdistinguished figures, Joseph Raz has claimed that what he calls the?incorporation thesis? cannot account for law?s claim of authority, andAndrei Marmor believes that the admission of entailed norms in a legalsystem would imply the mistaken view that it is necessarily coherent.In this paper we show that these two arguments are, at the very least,highly controversial; that the positivist social sources thesis, though notcommitted to it, is compatible with the validity of entailed norms, and thattaking into account the whole set of logical consequences of explicitlyissued norms is an unavoidable step in explaining the dynamic characterof legal systems.