Legal Metaphoric Artefacts

This work consists of two parts. In the first part I offer a historico-intentionalist theory of the artefactual character of legal institutions, trying to show how, if we conceive legal institutions as immaterial rule-based artefacts based on a deliberative history, several puzzling questions in legal philosophy can find a new answer. In the second part I try to show how legal institutions, despite their artifactual character, can also be “natural”—but only in the sense of not being easily detachable from our conception of nature. I then proceed to give several examples of this relation between the structure of legal institutions and perceived natural regularities or features, and in the final part of the work I advance the conjecture that that relation can be accounted for in the light of an influential theory of contemporary cognitive psychology, namely, Fauconnier and Turner' theory of conceptual integration or conceptual blending.