Imperatives, Normativity, and the Law

The rise of the administrative state was accompanied by an obses-sion with rules as the fundamental unit of legal analysis. This obses-sion has prevented legal scholars from transcending the limited concep-tion of law engendered by a key dogma of nineteenth century jurispru-dence: the dogma that laws are a species of commands, orders, or im-peratives. Unreflective doctrinaire acceptance of this dogma continues to perpetuate a false and misleading approach to the problem of legal normativity and to obscure the foundational role played by principles in the law. As a result, even as we enter the twenty-first century, legal scholars have yet to articulate a legal architectonic that properly situates the normative commitments of a society within a post-modem legal system. The present Article takes a first step towards rectifying this situation. As the reader will quickly realize, the present Article deploys rela-tively formal methods of argument grounded in the philosophy of lan