The Efficacy of Legal Norms and the Instrumentality of Law

Law is often understood as an instrument for achieving social ends. But this idea depends on a difficult assumption: that legal norms can make a causal difference to how people behave. My Ph.D. project asks what concept of legal efficacy we need in order to explain law as a tool of social intervention.

My work covers the following questions:

• What does it mean to explain the instrumentality of law?
• What is the dominant understanding of the efficacy of legal norms?
• Why has legal efficacy often been understood through an imperativist image of law?
• Can legal norms be efficacious even when their addressees do not know them?
• How should we understand the causal efficacy of legal norms?
• What role should causal, functional, and mechanistic explanations play in legal theory?

I approach these issues from legal theory and the philosophy of science, especially the philosophy of causation and explanation. The thesis reconstructs the dominant concept of legal efficacy, criticizes its limits, and develops an interventionist account of the causal efficacy of legal norms. The aim is to clarify under what conditions law can be understood as an instrument capable of producing patterns of compliant conduct and contributing to the realization of social ends.