The Artifactual Nature of Law

The artifact theory of law, developed in the last years (starting with works by Luka Burazin, Jonathan Crowe, Kenneth Ehrenberg, and Corrado Roversi up to the collection Law as an Artifact, edited by Luka Burazin, Kenneth Einar Himma and Corrado Roversi and published by Oxford University Press in 2018), has contributed to the elaboration of a new approach to explicating the nature of law. The idea was to appeal to the debate over the nature of artifacts, developed in analytic metaphysics, in order to enquire whether an explanation of law in terms of technical artifacts could shed new light on the question of the nature of law, legal systems, and legal institutions.This general idea drew the interest of leading legal philosophers, who explored its implications for legal theory in the collection published by Oxford UP. Since the publication of the Law as an Artifact book, many scholars have been exchanging ideas and perspectives to elaborate the artifact theory of law. Many of these ideas add important qualifications, criticisms, applications, and interdisciplinary methodologies to the artifact theory of law. In this way, a new community has begun to emerge, and the project of having a new book being the ideal continuation of the first one became for us an important scientific enterprise. This book furthers the work on the idea of law as an artifact.