Abstract

The nature of the “authority” is one of the main problems of juridical philosophy. Within the problem of “judgment”, the key is how to explain that an external command turns into an internal principle of action. Modern jurisprudence has given two great opposite lines of answers: law is external constriction, reducing law to force; or else, law is a decision of a will that has been artificially identified with the will of the state. Both answers have proved to be insufficient. The thesis of this paper is that the answer of a classical realistic philosophy con- sists in a voluntary identity of the practical reason of the justice made possible by the authority of particular decisions. This means that the positive law is a formal model, like paradigm, of the order of justice in all its levels, and that the real authority of the ius is the practical decision like a product of autonomy of the person.