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This chapter presents the critique of some basic and most commonly encountered jurisprudential conceptions of legal validity. The analysed conceptions propose to explain the intension of the concept of legal validity by indicating the feature or features of legal norms, which are identical to their validity. A general form of the analysed definitions is expressed by the following schematic formulation: "A norm of statutory law is valid if, and only if it has a feature C (or features C₁, C₂, …, C_n)". The conducted analyses lead to the conclusion that neither the definitions of validity based on a single concept (e.g., membership, application, applicability, observance or efficacy), nor on selected combinations of those concepts, can be considered a proper clarification of the intension of the juristic concept of the validity of statutory law. This fact makes us aware that the clarification of the intension of this concept, which would be theoretically correct and actually useful for lawyers, must be sought in a different way.

DOI: 10.1007/978-3-642-27688-0_7

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