THEORETICAL AND PRACTICAL VALIDITY OF LEGAL NORMS:SOME PROBLEMS OF THEIR IMPLEMENTATION IN PRACTICE BY CITIZENS
Keywords:
Legal knowledge, legal logic, efficiency, legal validityAbstract
The experience of justice creates, in its normative statements, a distinction between the state of being something and what ought to be. The relationship between these two states of human existence in the world is particularly emphasized by Kelsen and belongs to the subject of examination in the philosophy of law, which analyzes this distinction between legal knowledge and its applicability.
Logification of law is is one of the directions of the validity of legal norms encompassed in its legal procedures. Therefore, Kelsen, Alexy, Raz insist on a logical exposition of the law, seeing logic as the tool for processing law in society, as well as its regulation.
When we talk about the implementation of legal norms, it is assumed that the person reading the law should not only engage in the logical connection of the relevant words that signify it—meaning what the legislator intended—but also reconstruct the text based on the field experience they possess and the preconceptions they have about the law.
In this way, the conditions and possibilities of understanding laws are found in the "world of life," in the social environment, the community where the individual trying to understand the law resides. The influence of preconceptions of the legal text does not mean that this process depends entirely on individual consciousness, but it arises from the person's experience with the law and what jurists call "precedents" or "doctrine," which encapsulates a sometimes invisible system of legal techniques in the world of law.
Another difference between legal normative knowledge and its acceptance as a standard of behavior and actions in a society has two main directions: laws can be enforced out of fear of sanctions, and this experience is characterized as the efficiency of its implementation. However, if legal rules are applied because citizens believe they are good for solving some of their problems, then we are dealing with legal validity.
The importance of this distinction in the relationship between legal normative knowledge and its implementation serves to understand why some Eastern European countries with totalitarian mindsets, such as Albania, face difficulties in law enforcement. This is because they rely more on the external efficiency of legal norms rather than on creating a legitimacy (validity) of these norms in the eyes of the citizens.
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