Abstract
This essay considers the influence that John Searle’s conception of constitutive rules has exerted within the philosophy of law. It argues that a number of influential legal philosophers have embraced the legal existence of constitutive rules, and that this has led them to misapprehend the nature of legal validity. To make this point, the chapter contends that it is natural to think of validity criteria as a particular subset of constitutive rules—a category that Amedeo Conte calls “anankastic-constitutive rules.” The chapter then explains how a series of different legal theorists have applied this idea within their accounts of legal validity and argues that it has led each one into significant descriptive-explanatory problems.
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Grellette, M. (2021). Constitutive Rules, Criteria of Validity, and Law. In: Di Lucia, P., Fittipaldi, E. (eds) Revisiting Searle on Deriving "Ought" from "Is". Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-54116-3_11
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-54116-3_11
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