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Dictionary
rule of recognition
noun
A notion of what should "count" as law.
Exact(41)
But a rule of recognition is not a Grundnorm, a transcendental presupposition of legal thought.
Hart recognized that officials might treat the rule of recognition as obligatory for many different kinds of reasons, and he also recognized that they might be wrong to do so.
Hart claimed that wherever a legal system exists, there also exists a "rule of recognition" that specifies the criteria of legal validity that any rule must satisfy in order to count as a rule of that legal system.
Under the prevailing rule of recognition in a jurisdiction, legal officials are both authorized and obligated to follow specific criteria in determining which norms possess the status of laws.
Hart had never denied that claim, however; what he denied was only that such moral considerations were necessarily part of the law, unless they were also part of society's rule of recognition.
Of course, many laws fail to satisfy this demanding standard, but Raz also argued that only a rule of recognition employing source-based criteria of legal validity criteria such as "enacted by parliament" or "proclaimed by the king"—could possibly possess genuine authority.
Similar(19)
My suggestion is that we should accept not one but two rules of recognition in the concept of law.
In other words, there is nothing special in the idea of a legal obligation to follow the rules of recognition.
We saw that Hart tried to base the normative force of law on rules of recognition, which provide shared tests of validity for rules of the system.
Similarly, the rules of recognition cannot settle for the judge, or anyone else for that matter, whether they should play by the rules of law, or not.
From a moral point of view, the rules of recognition, by themselves, cannot be regarded as sources of obligation to follow the law.
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Justyna Jupowicz-Kozak
CEO of Professional Science Editing for Scientists @ prosciediting.com