This thought-provoking book develops and elaborates on the artifact theory of law, covering a wide range of related theoretical and practical topics. Offering a range of perspectives that flesh out the artifact theory of law, it also introduces criticisms of previous formulations of the theory and inquires into its potential payoffs. Featuring international contributions from both noted and up-and-coming scholars in law and philosophy, the book is divided into two parts. The first part further explores and evaluates the concept of law as an artifact and analyses the background and theoretical basis of the theory. The second part comprises three sections on legal ontology, semantics and legal normativity, specifically in relation to law's artifactual nature. Providing cutting-edge insights at the intersection of law and philosophy, this book will appeal to scholars and students in philosophy of law, empirical legal studies, social ontology and the philosophy of society.

This volume assembles leading scholars to examine how their respective theoretical positions relate to the artifactual nature of law. It offers a complete analysis of what is ontologically entailed by the claim that law - including legal systems, legal norms, and legal institutions - is an artifact, and what consequences, if any, this claim has for philosophical accounts of law. Examining the artifactual nature of law draws attention to the role that intention, function, and action play in the ontological structure of law, and how these attributes interact with rules. It puts the role of author and authorship at the center of its analysis of legal ontology, and widens the scope that functional analysis can legitimately have in legal theory, emphasizing how the content of law depends on how it is used. Furthermore, the appeal to artifacts brings to the fore questions about the significance of concepts for the existence of law, and makes available new tools for legal interpretation. The notion of artifactuality offers a starting point from which to approach the basic dilemma of whether it is meaningful to search for essential, necessary, and sufficient features of law, a question that in current legal theory is put when deciding what kind of enterprise legal theory is from a methodological point of view, namely whether it is descriptive or prescriptive. This volume unearths insights and observations of value to all those looking to deepen their understanding of how the law is understood and experienced.

The fifth volume in the series of the Central and Eastern European Forum for Legal, Political, and Social Theory Yearbook addresses two major topics: law and state. The authors shed new light on some of the classical paradigms in the treatment of these highly prominent topics and offer novel proposals on how to best approach them. The contributions were presented and discussed at the 6th CEE Forum, held in 2014 at the Zagreb Faculty of Law (Croatia) and peer-reviewed by international experts in the field. The volume's six thematic parts reflect the main issues discussed: Law and State, Methodological Approaches, Language and Law, Constitutional and EU Law, Contemporary State, and State and Crisis.