Via Torben Spaaks Facebook-sida fick jag veta att rättsfilosofen John Gardner (född 1965) är död. Ett sorgligt besked. Gardner lämnar dock efter sig en hel del klokskap, som vi kan fortsätta att ta del och lära av. Inte minst har han bidragit till insiktsfulla analyser av rättspositivismen. Ett av hans bidrag tycker jag särskilt mycket om: ”Legal Positivism: 5½ Myths”. Hans definition av rättspositivismen lyder:

(LP) In any legal system, whether a given norm is legally valid, and hence
whether it forms part of the law of that system, depends on its sources, not its
merits.

I en fascinerande intervju belyser han, i pedagogiska ordalag, ett av de ämnen han behandlar i artikeln, nämligen rättspositivismens (LP:s) ”höna-ägg-problem”.

One of the great puzzles of legal philosophy, which LP foregrounds, is what Scott Shapiro calls the ‘chicken and egg’ puzzle. Legal officials make law, says LP. But law also makes legal officials. How is it possible for law to make its own makers? Hart had an answer, which I think is broadly right. (Shapiro has a rival one, which I think is broadly wrong.) Hart’s key move, in my view, is to recognise that not all law is made by the relevant people’s attempts to make it. Often law is made by accident, including by people who are trying only to follow or apply law that they take to exist already. If they are the relevant people they can sometimes change the law by misunderstanding it. From this one can build a picture of how they come to be the relevant people. They become the relevant people by treating each other, mistakenly, as already being the relevant people. It is a collective and accidental form of self-appointment. Hart called the gradually mutating customary norm by which officials recognise each other as officials (and hence become the officials of a system of norms in which they are so recognised) the ‘ultimate rule of recognition’ of a legal system and he claimed, I think rightly, that every legal system necessarily has at least one of them.

Ett rättssystem måste alltså ha en typ av icke-formell institution – ett slags konvention och meta-norm – som klargör vad som utgör lag. Gardner menar, som jag förstår honom, att H. L. A. Hart hade rätt i att det är ett slags ”spontan ordning” som klargör vilkas åsikter om detta som spelar roll. Det är inte lagen som klargör det; meta-normen kommer före lagen.