Sanctions: An Essential Element of Law?

Nicoletta Bersier · Christoph Bezemek · Frederick Schauer

May 2025 · Law and Philosophy Library Book 149 · Springer Nature

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175

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About this ebook

The volume is dedicated to the concept of sanctions and to the reassessment of its interrelation with the concept of law. It does not seem that long ago that “law” and “sanctions” were thought of as necessarily interrelated. “Every Law is a command”, we read in Austin’s ‘Province of Jurisprudence Determined’; a particular command, however, in “that the party to whom it is directed is liable to evil from the other, in case he [does not] comply”. And “[t]he evil which will probably be incurred in case a command be disobeyed […] is frequently called a sanction”. H. L. A. Hart’s critique of Austin’s “command theory of law” successfully drove a wedge into the interrelation of “law and “sanctions”; so successful, in fact, that it caused some scholars to part with the idea of “force” underlying the concept of law altogether and others to emphatically protest what they perceived as a rash move to discard one of the core elements of law. The debate still is on.

About the author

Prof. Nicoletta Bersier is a member of Thémis Institute, Geneva. She has authored and (co-)edited numerous publications on legal theory and legal sociology.

Prof. Christoph Bezemek is a Professor of Public Law and Political Theory at University of Graz. His research focuses on comparative constitutional law, free speech, and legal and political theory.

Prof. Frederick Schauer was the David and Mary Harrison Distinguished Professor of Law at the University of Virginia and Frank Stanton Professor (Emeritus) of the First Amendment at the Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University. He has authored numerous publications on constitutional law, in particular on free speech, and on legal theory. He was a Co-Editor of Springer’s Law and Philosophy Library.

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