Does Law Exist Ideally? Lorenz Kaehler's Ontology of Law Revisited

Abstract

reveal the key arguments of Kaehler’s ontological ideality thesis and to demonstrate their limitations: it is argued that Kaehler’s objections to the claim to correctness thesis are largely persuasive, but his positive ontological thesis, modelled on abstract objects such as numbers, Fregean thoughts, or Popper’s “world 3” is not adequately supported by the examples he offers, and that these examples are better explained by a modest positivist account according to which law persists through copies, institutional memory, and interpretive communities rather than through an independent immaterial realm of propositional legal content.