Ratio Juris. Vol. 23 No. 2 June 2010 (167–82) The Dual Nature of Law*raju_449 167..182 ROBERT ALEXY Abstract. The argument of this article is that the dual-nature thesis is not only capable of solving the problem of legal positivism, but also addresses all funda- mental questions of law. Examples are the relation between deliberative democracy and democracy qua decision-making procedure along the lines of the majority principle, the connection between human rights as moral rights and constitutional rights as positive rights, the relation between constitutional review qua ideal representation of the people and parliamentary legislation, the commitment of legal argumentation to both authoritative and non-authoritative reasons, and the dis- tinction between rules as expressing a real “ought” and principles as expressing its ideal counterpart. All of this underscores the point that the dual nature of law is the single most essential feature of law. The law has a dual nature, and it is this thesis that I wish to explicate. The dual-nature thesis sets out the claim that law necessarily comprises both a real or factual dimension and an ideal or critical one. In the definition of law, the factual dimension is represented by the elements of authoritative issuance and social efficacy, whereas the ideal dimension finds its expres- sion in the element of moral correctness. Authoritative issuance and social efficacy are social facts. If one claims that social facts alone can determine what is and is not required by law, that amounts to the endorsement of a positivistic concept of law. Once moral correctness is added as a necessary third element, the picture changes fundamentally. A non-positivistic concept of law emerges. Therefore, the dual-nature thesis implies non- positivism. To be sure, as thus stated the dual-nature thesis remains abstract and formal. In order to arrive at concrete content and a clear structure, the thesis has to be explicated within a system. The overarching idea of this system is the institutionalization of reason. The political form manifested by the system is democratic or discursive constitutionalism. The system * I should like to thank Stanley L. Paulson for suggestions and advice on matters of English style. © 2010 The Author. Journal compilation © 2010 Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden 02148, USA. 168 Robert Alexy itself is generated in three steps—the argument on behalf of the ideal dimension of law, the argument on behalf of positivity, that is, the real dimension of law, and the reconciliation of the ideal with the real. I. The Ideal I.1. The Claim to Correctness At a first step, the ideal dimension of law has to be established. My argument turns on the thesis that law necessarily raises a claim to correct- ness, and that this claim comprises a claim to moral correctness. This claim to correctness is the source of the necessary relation between law and morality. a) Law is Capable of Making Claims Against the correctness thesis many objections have been raised. Four are of special significance. The first contests the notion that law is capable of making claims at all. Neil MacCormick puts it this way: “[L]aw claims nothing” (MacCormick 2007, 59). His argument is, first, that law is a “normative order,” secondly, that normative orders are “[s]tates of affairs,” and, thirdly, that states of affairs are, in contrast to persons, incapable of having intentions or making claims (ibid., 60). MacCormick is, without doubt, right in maintaining that law as such is incapable of raising, in a literal sense, any claim. In a literal or strict sense, claims can be raised only by subjects having the capacity to speak and to act (see Alexy 1999a, 24). Nevertheless, talk about the claim of law to correctness seems to be sensible, for this claim is raised by persons, in particular, though not solely (Alexy 2007b, 334–5), by officials, on behalf of the law. Persons raising the claim to correctness on behalf of the law may be characterized as representatives of the law. The rejection of the first objection, therefore, amounts to the following thesis: Law can and does raise a claim to correctness, for the claim is made by its representatives. b) The Necessity of the Claim to Correctness The second objection denies that the claim to correctness is necessarily raised in law. Whether law raises any claims, and which claims, if any, it raises, is said to be an empirical question. One might call this the “contingency thesis.” If the contingency thesis were true, the dual-nature thesis, which essentially comprises the concept of necessity, would collapse. One way of answering this objection is to demonstrate that the claim to correctness is necessarily implicit in law. The best means of demonstration is the method of performative contradiction (see on this Alexy 2002a, 35–9). © 2010 The Author. Journal compilation © 2010 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Ratio Juris, Vol. 23, No. 2 The Dual Nature of Law 169 An example of a performative contradiction is the fictitious first article of a constitution that reads: X is a sovereign, federal, and unjust republic. It is scarcely possible to deny that this article is somehow absurd. The idea underlying the method of performative contradiction is to explain the absurdity as stemming from a contradiction between what is implicitly claimed in framing a constitution, namely, that it is just, and what is explicitly declared, namely, that it is unjust. Now, justice counts as a special case of correctness, for justice is nothing other than the correctness of distribution and compensation (Alexy 1997, 105). Thus, our example shows that law and the claim to correctness are not only, as Eugenio Bulygin argues (Bulygin 1993, 23–4), connected by prudential reasons, but also— and this is much more—by reasons conceptual in nature. This connection is by no means confined to such fundamental acts as framing a constitu- tion. It is present everywhere in the legal system. The absurdity of decisions such as the following makes this explicit: The accused is sentenced to life imprisonment, which is an incorrect interpretation of prevailing law. It might be objected that conceptual considerations of this kind do not address the issue. The question of whether the representatives of law raise a claim to correctness is a question of fact, and it is a fact that there are representatives who do not raise it. Ronald Dworkin’s argument, brought against Raz’s thesis that law claims legitimate authority, runs in exactly this direction. According to Dworkin it is a matter of fact that “many officials do not” make such claims (Dworkin 2006, 200; see also Bulygin 2000, 134). Oliver Wendell Holmes is said to be an example. According to Dworkin, Justice Holmes was not concerned with moral claims but with “making the cost of acting in certain ways more expensive” (Dworkin 2006, 200). The reply to this objection draws, as replies often do, on a distinction. It is the distinction between an objective or official and a subjective or private raising of the claim to correctness (Alexy 1998a, 206). When Dworkin talks about the “actual beliefs or attitudes of officials” (Dworkin 2006, 200) he refers to the subjective or private side. This misses the decisive point. Subjectively or privately officials may believe or feel whatever they wish. But as soon as they act on behalf of the law, that is, as representatives of the law, they cannot avoid making the claim objectively or officially (see on this Gardner forthcoming). To be sure, a legal system can degenerate into a system based exclusively on the exercise of brute force. Such a system, however, would not be a legal system but, rather, its very opposite, a system of naked power relations (Alexy 2002a, 32–4). That the claim to Ratio Juris, Vol. 23, No. 2 © 2010 The Author. Journal compilation © 2010 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 170 Robert Alexy correctness is not raised in such a system is, therefore, no argument against its necessity in a legal system. c) The Content of the Claim to Correctness One might concede that law is capable of raising claims and that raising claims is necessary for law, and nevertheless insist that this scarcely counts as an argument on behalf of the dual nature of law. One simply has to argue that the content of the claim does not contain anything pointing in an ideal direction. Two versions of this argument are conceivable. The first declares that the claim to correctness is trivial or formal, or both. The second version maintains that the content of the claim refers exclusively to the real or factual dimension of law. A variant of the first version is to be found in Joseph Raz’s work. Raz maintains that the claim to correctness thesis is nothing other than “a general thesis about intentional actions and their products” (Raz 2007, 27). As such, it applies to each and every case of intentional action, even to the actions of bandits. Here, the claim to correctness or, as Raz prefers to say, to “appropriateness” (ibid.) may take on such content as, for instance “being self-enriching” (ibid.). This example, however, shows that a general claim to appropriateness is essen- tially different from the claim to correctness. A bandit who claims that his action is self-enriching does not thereby claim that his action, for that reason, has to be accepted by everyone, even by his victims. This is altogether different in case of the claim to correctness. The claim to correctness is a claim that is addressed to all.1 In this respect, it is similar to the claim to truth.