Abstract

The paper focuses on and criticizes the jurisprudential approaches of the last twenty years, paying particular attention to the Anglo-Saxon recent trend and the essentialist turn in jurisprudence. Against the direction opened up by Hart, Dworkin and Rawls, contemporary jurisprudence has resumed to reduce law to its imperative and coercive dimension, and legal philosophy to a discipline fundamentally devoid of any practical relevance, including legal reasoning. Counteracting these new tendencies, the paper outlines a research agenda aimed at re-establishing the relevance of jurisprudence in the realm of praxis. Starting from an idea of the practice of law as a self-reflexive exercise aimed at pragmatically defining the concept of law, as distinct from both artefacts and practices which do not raise definition issues, the author argues for the crucial function of legal philosophy in formulating an idea of law that can serve as a standard of correctness for legal reasoning. To this end, the author relies on the categories of Dworkin and Arendt, adding, at the close of the essay, the proposal to integrate this conceptual framework with a criterial or conventionalist concept of law. In this perspective law is seen as an interpretive concept, but it would be pragmatically oriented, though normatively anchored.