Many recent arguments about the role of coercive sanctions in law suggest that the importance of coercion is underrated. The question has thus been where the lower threshold for coercion might be within a legal system. Very little attention, by contrast, has been paid to whether, at some upper threshold, coerciveness might itself present a problem for law, even on a positivist account. In this article I therefore interrogate the standard positivist picture from this unorthodox direction: Is it true that (...) there is no degree of coerciveness that is incompatible with a system of law? Or, in other words, have we gone far enough in circumscribing the role of coercion in our account of law? I argue that coercion of a certain kind undermines the conditions necessary for the social normative practices that ground legality on social accounts of law. Sufficiently coercive circumstances, I conclude, can diminish the law’s normativity by inhibiting the conditions necessary for the effective transmission of norms. (shrink)

Many of the interests protected by public law are regularly violated by powerful private actors. Analysing the application of public law rights to the private sphere, this book develops a theoretical framework for the application of human and constitutional rights in relations between private parties.

rights is a normative concept. This gives rise to three desiderata for conceptualising rights: first, given the wide variety of contexts in which rights are invoked, an account of rights must be su...

Volume 10, Issue 3, September 2019, Page 408-421.