Kenneth M. Ehrenberg on Law's Artifactual Nature

Kenneth M. Ehrenberg, University of Alabama, Department of Philosophy, and School of Law, has published Law's Artifactual Nature: How Legal Institutions Generate Normativity, in Reasons and Intentions in Law and Practical Agency 247-266 (George Pavlakos and Veronica Rodriguez-Blanco, eds.; Cambridge University Press, 2015). Here is the abstract.

I argue that law is best understood as an institutionalized abstract artifact. Using the ideas of John Searle on institutions and Amie Thomasson on artifacts, I show how the law is capable of generating new reasons for action, arguing against recent work by David Enoch who holds that legal reason-giving is ultimately a form of triggering conditional reasons.

Download the essay from SSRN at the link.