How is The Theory of Law Possible? The Subject Area of Legal Theory in A. Reinach's Phenomenological Project

Abstract

The article discusses Adolf Reinach's legal doctrine project, as presented in his main work 'The Apriori Foundations of Civil Law'. The author explores the subject matter of Reinach's theoretical discipline of law and the apodictic necessity of apriori laws rooted in the essence of legal concepts. The analysis focuses on the nature of apriori laws that are based on the essence of the legal concept and the correlative relation between apriori laws and their corresponding essence. The legal doctrine of Reinach is examined with special attention to its philosophical and methodological consistency, which is conditioned by the phenomenological method during the period of the Munich-Göttingen community. The author examines the differences between the first project of eidetic-phenomenological philosophy of law and the philosophy of positive law. This article demonstrates how the phenomenological theory of cognition, specifically the theory of science, was incorporated into A. Reinach's apriori doctrine of law. To reveal the problem, it is necessary to establish connections between A. Reinach's 'Apriori Foundations of Civil Law' and Edmund Husserl's 'Logical Investigations'. The article concludes that the concept of the apriori doctrine of law represents the realization of Husserl's theory of science as outlined in the 'Logical Investigations'. The article concludes that A. Reinach defined the subject area of the theory of law by attributing it to the intensional being, relying on E. Husserl's understanding of science. It is argued that the oneness of this subject area of legal theory lies in the intensional (essence-correlative) correlation of the essence of legal concepts and their apriori laws. This study's novelty lies in revealing the epistemological aspects of Reinach's eidetic-phenomenological project, which hold methodological value for phenomenological theory of law.