Values Underlying the Conventionalization of Law

Abstract: Values Underlying the Conventionalization of Law
The article has two aims: firstly, to show that values underlie the conventionalization of law. Secondly, to show that values limit the risk of certain meaning rules of conventional acts being identified as meaning rules of legal conventional acts, which may lead to a blurring of the boundary between what is and what is not law. The conventionalization of law consists of three elements: the substrate of a legal conventional act, legal conventional acts, and the rules of meaning of legal conventional acts. The article argues that the meaning rules of conventional acts do not constitute individual natural acts, or conventional acts built upon those natural acts, but rather constitute social practice – a certain type of activity governed by a whole set of interrelated rules. Moreover, these rules are conventional in the sense given to them by A. Marmor. The article argues that the meaning rules constituting legal practice also constitute the values inherent to that practice. These are values that can be described as core, constitutive values of that practice. This makes it very difficult to classify certain meaning rules found in culture in the strict sense as belonging to legal practice, and the risk of blurring the boundaries of law thus appears to be minimal.