Norms that Confer Competence规范赋予竞争力.pdfVIP

Ratio Juris. Vol. 16 No. 1 March 2003 (89–104) Norms that Confer Competence* TORBEN SPAAK Abstract. The author maintains that norms that confer competence (or power) on persons should be understood as duty-imposing norms addressed to legal officials, rather than as special competence norms whose sole function is to confer competence, and which are addressed to the competence-holders themselves. The argument is that only duty-imposing norms are genuine norms in the sense that they give complete reasons for action. En route to this conclusion the author analyzes norms in terms of reasons for action, and considers the problem of norm-individuation and the action- guiding capacity of norms. 1. Introduction Analytical philosophers of law have a keen interest in analyzing fundamental legal concepts, such as “right” (see Wellman 1958), “duty” (see Hart 1982b), “(in)validity” (see Guastini 1994), “act-in-the-law” (see Svensson 1996), “(change of a) legal position” (see Lindahl 1977), “analogy” (see Frändberg 1973), “norm” (see Ross 1968), and “legal system” (Raz 1980). Wesley Hohfeld’s analysis from the early 20th century for eight fundamental concepts is widely con- sidered to be a paradigm of this type of analysis (Hohfeld 1964).1 The concepts can be arranged in the following schema, in which a vertical line indicates that the concepts are correlatives and a diagonal line indicates that they are opposites.2 * An earlier version of this paper was presented at a workshop on norms and competence on December 15, 1997, at the University of Genoa Law School, and at the higher seminar in jurispru- dence at the University of Uppsala. I thank the participants for making a number of interesting and valuable remarks. I also thank professors Anders Agell, Åke Frändberg, and Aleksander Peczenik for very valuable comments and criticism of a later version of this article, and Robert Carr