Abstract

One of the most conspicuous features of law, as it works in the world of our experience, is that legal norms are characteristically backed by coercive enforcement mechanisms. Nevertheless, many legal philosophers specializing in conceptual jurisprudence believe that coercion is not a conceptually necessary feature of law. In this essay, I argue that the authorization of coercive enforcement mechanisms is a conceptually necessary feature of law. I ground the argument in the Hartian claim that the sense of ‘law’ requiring explication picks out municipal legal systems in the modern state; widely accepted Razian claims about how our legal practices construct the content of our legal concepts; claims showing the centrality of coercive enforcement mechanisms in every paradigm instance of law we have ever known; and logical difficulties arising in connection with explaining legal normativity in a system without such mechanisms.