L’eredità di Raz: il diritto tra autorità legittima e ragioni protette

Abstract

Raz’s Legacy. The Law Between Legitimate Authority and Protected Reasons. The work of Joseph Raz has exerted an undoubted influence on discussions in the field of the philosophy of law in recent decades. One of the points of particular influence is his position regarding the philosophy of law as a branch of practical philosophy, alongside moral philosophy and political philosophy, and therefore necessarily focused on the analysis of the practical reasoning of the addressees of legal norms. In this short contribution, I will show the originality and depth of the Razian work in the framework of legal philosophy by focusing on two points: the idea of legal norms as protected reasons for action and the Razian concept of legitimate authority. I will also show how these theses can be understood as the product of a conceptually and chronologically concatenated elaboration in response to one of the greatest challenges concerning law and authority: the so-called anarchist challenge – that is, the idea that it is impossible to find compatibility between authority and autonomy, and between authority and rationality.