Abstract

A permanent approach to what law is has been that of interpreting it in terms of repression or reduction of chances or courses of conduct. This approach, however, is not able to render justice to fundamental moments of the legal practice, beginning with constitutional law and its empowering rules. Nonetheless, the mainstream in the philosophy of law and in the legal theory has not at all been worried about this strange inadequacy of imperativism to offer a complete view of legal practice and legal institutions. Force, violence, sanction, prescription still are the basic conceptual knots used to weave the cloth of law and lawyers. Hannah Arendt perceptive though scanty remarks on law, within her wider reflections on action and judgment, offer a different view and open a new path for a jurisprudence less obsessed with coercion, and against the tradition supporting the centrality of command in the tlegal domain. Such view and that path this paper tries sympathetically to explore