Explore Raz's The Proposition Of Legal Authority

Though the concept of authority are controversial in the field of the logical and political philosophy, they do not deny that the authority and power are closely linked. Through the power normalization, the authority arranges and joints the actions of other actors by the way of order. Every member of society would pursue variety of targets which are conflicted, and face the difficulties to settle the disputes and profits conflicts. Through the setting of authority, the actions of the various individual actors are placed or kept in the state of order to avoid the arbitrary and disorder of social order, to coordinated to achieve the special and general targets and to set the agreement of the common value and the best ways of value realizations. A standard system claims that it has the authority to adjust the behaviors'which include the realistic adjustment and the direct and indirect adjustment by performing the acknowledgement of power in this system. As a major social standard system, the law demands people's loyalty, obedience and assertion of self authority.The natural law jurisprudence and legal positivism have the assertions of themselves to the legality of law authority. The natural law jurisprudence thinks that each principle of law has the value of moral. The law becomes the standard because it has the moral validity. The law can be regarded as the effective moral standard. It is true that the law derives from the moral standard. The authority and validity are derived from the essential moral standard and value. However, the legal positivism makes the law frees from the bound of religion, morality and politics. The relative independence is established. And the matters as the law authority are discussed in the field of the law. In their opinion, the law authority could be sleeked and emerged in the law system itself. For example, the law authority is endowed by the basic standard and acknowledged rule in any concreted law and has the legal authority. The thesis is discussed in the view of the legal positivism and law authority. The structure is going like this.In the first part, the author explains the general theory of authority. It includes the concept of authority, the basis types and the objective necessary of authority in the life of modern society. This part is the basic theory for the following to discuss. The authority has various meanings in different contexts. The law asserts that the authority generates from the standard power. It is a kind of important practical authority and hold the legality of itself. The law authority claims the universality of law system adjustment. The law system claims that it is supreme, is a direction behaviors to settle the disputes and has the highest authority to intervene any kinds of activities. It also regularly supports and confines other rules to invent and practice in the society. The law claims that it provides a general structure for the behaviors of various social life and will be the supreme guard of the society.In the second part, the author selects the main theories of law authority in legal positivism to discuss and criticize the flaws, such as the"enforceability"authority of Austen, the"authorization"authority of Kelsey, the"inherent"authority of Harter. It reveals the evolution process of the law authority positivism theory and prepares for the raise of Razz's law authority.The third part is the key point of the thesis. The author illustrates proposition of Razz's law authority comprehensively. Razz thinks that development of the positivist in law authority has released from the bound of the natural law theory, but the relative authority theory studies in positivism still could not explain the problems as the essence of authority and the practical meaning of owning authority. He thinks that the authority studies should get over two obstacles. One is to avoid the confusions of the concepts of authority in relative methodology. The second is how to solve the paradox of the authority concepts. Razz selects the reason of practical action as the breakthrough to explain the authority and founds the concepts connection between the law and the authority. He treats the authority as a proposition to settle the disputes of the law and morality in the philosophy of law. There are two reasons which can be divided as the first-reason and the second-reason. According to the first-reason, it should be judged what should do and that is not the only practical reasoning pattern people should relies on. In Razz's opinion, the importance of second-reason shows its exclusiveness and priority. The reason of exclusiveness is not the common action's first-reason but would exclude or replace all the first-reason. The law is a kind of the exclusive reasons system. The essence of law is showed through getting rid of reasons of the potential competitive actions. The second-reason also excludes the independent judgments of actors. To some extent, it is against the reason of man's self-discipline (the paradox of the authority). So, it should illustrate the legitimacy of the law authority and accomplish this through the settlement of authority paradoxIn part four, it is to apply Razz's theory of legal authority to Law, in which way it analyzes the problems of separation in Law, how to treat the Rule of Law, judging if official documents have the general obligation of obeying the law, and how to treat the law. From Razz's theory of legal authority, the assertion of separation between the law and morality has been confirmed in a further step. The law only negatively has the instrument value, which can not be over-endowed social aims, and it does not have the general obligation of obeying the law. The attitude to good law is to regard the law.