The Normative Theoty Of Legal Rights

The legal rights is an important but controversial law concept. Since the modern time, there has been the contest between“will theory”and“interest theory”in the legal theory. The nature of the contest is about the nature of the legal norms, or the normativity of law, which is ignored in their arguments, but actually they construct their rights concepts based on their understanding on the normativity of law.The controversy between the concerned parties origins from the two dimensions between factuality and validity existed on the intuition level of the legal norms, which is the effect of long-existed objective thinking model in law, to make an alternative choice between them, but each one is an one-sided opinion. The different concepts on the legal rights constructed on the alternative approach to the normativity of law, argue against each other for a long time.Hart undoubtedly is the pioneer to demonstrate the normativity of the legal rights and the duality beyond factuality and validity, in discussing the concept of the legal rights. Due to his open attitude to the objectiveness of value, Hart finds no the evidence to reasonably interpret the validity, so he can’t meet us the expectation of the normativity of law. Contrastively, Hart’s concept of rights is endlessly interfered by the reductionist, finding nothing of the independence of the legal rights because he gives up the factor the objectiveness of value. Along the approach of self-understanding in law, Dworkin makes a great achievement to explore the moral validity of law, the testifying nature of the legal rights from his ethic individualism. His individualism ignores the social face of law, making the legal rights the evidence on testifying the political power, and arriving at an anti-intuition conclusion, nothing existing except judgment-making. Comparatively speaking, Raz’s rights concept is more persuasive, which put the objective significance of law on the level of law as social system, and accept the moral significance of the legal rights on one hand, the individual objectiveness independent of it on the other. The concept of the legal rights can obtain its irreduction from the moral obligation of law, and reflect our intuition on the social function of the legal rights.Enriched from the before contests, from the perspective of the self-understanding of law, the legal norms behaves as morals, and law locates its moral purpose, and the legal obligation as the guide of the subject conduct embodies the critique of law to conduct which isn’t empty but its moral reasons. So the necessary relationship between rights and obligation can only be interpreted by the justifying reasons, or at least a part of it can. If we recognize the reading of morality on“humanism”, and if we recall the intuition“rights is concerned with the individual interests”, the legal rights can be primarily defined as: the possession of the legal rights means the recognition of the individual interests in law constituting the sufficient reason to the obligation of others. According to the self-understanding of law, the concept of the legal rights is relational, connecting together the individual interests and the obligation of others, and distributive and peremptory.