The Legal Relation: Legal Theory after Legal Positivism

What is law? The usual answer is that the law is a system of norms. But this answer gives us at best half of the story. The law is a way of relating to one another. We do not do this as lovers or friends and not as people who are interested in obtaining guidance from moral insight. In a legal context, we are cast as 'character masks' (Marx), for example, as 'buyer' and 'seller' or 'landlord' and 'tenant'. We expect to have our claims respected simply because the law has given us rights. We ...