Rules of Law

Abstract

This chapter discusses the propositional form of rules of law. The “anomaly” about a rule of law, that it “is made for the purpose of covering its own breach” was an “anomaly” which depends on first seeing the rule as in a fundamental sense a command. The Oughtness of a legal consequence in a propositional form of rule lay in an inevitable and similar flux between legal rightness and ethical rightness. Rules of law were rules with the function of accomplishing control by language-communication. There were two elements in this: language-communication and accomplishment of control. The very propositional form of [a] rule of law was itself an ideal type, not a description of the actual and current rules. Current rules were very commonly elliptical in phrasing; on the case-law side, they rarely have an accepted form of precise wording—what is “the universally accepted rule” is an idea, not a phrasing.