Abstract

In this paper I will focus on Adolf Reinach’s work A Priori Foundations of Civil Law. Reinach, a member of the so-called “Circle of Göttingen”, formed around Edmund Husserl, sought in this work to apply phenomenology, understood as a doctrine of essences, to the problem of the constitution of legal norms. Surprisingly, however, his starting point is an analysis of the promise – whose legal status is weak, appearing only in some civil codes (as the Portuguese), in expressions such as “promise of sale” – and the Verbindlichkeit it establishes between the one who makes the promise and the person who is promised something. Between promise and its fulfilment Reinach establishes a logical relation of cause and consequence, although he claims a different status for his legal formalism from that of Kant’s. In this paper I will address not only Reinach’s starting point, but also his claim to ground the Science of Law on objective legal formations, which can be intuited in the same way numbers or physical objects are intuited.