Introduction
Some jurisprudential theories take efficacy (or, as it is also called, effectiveness) to be one of the essential elements of their concepts of law. This is evident in those legal positivistic theories which to some extent regard efficacy as a condition of legal validity and even more so in those legal realistic theories that tend to identify legal validity with or reduce it to efficacy. Natural law theories, of course, do not pay much attention to the concept of efficacy since they consider validity of legal norms to be entirely independent of their efficacy (Bulygin 2015: 37; Kelsen 1967: 211; Ross 1958: 18).
Efficacy has different meanings within legal discourse. It may, e.g., refer to the capacity of legal norms to produce legal effects (e.g., rights, duties, liabilities, etc.) or to their capacity to realize the goals for which they were produced or to the fact that their addressees actually behave as they require of them (Pino 2013: 174–177; Hernández MarÃn 2002:...
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Burazin, L. (2017). The Concept of Law and Efficacy. In: Sellers, M., Kirste, S. (eds) Encyclopedia of the Philosophy of Law and Social Philosophy. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-6730-0_231-1
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