La norma di riconoscimento come ideologia delle fonti

The essay argues that the rule of recognition, as it has been conceived by H. L. A. Hart, is either a redundant, and hence mostly useless, concept, or it is a concept with limited explanatory potential - in either case, at best a concept whose scope is much narrower, in contemporary legal systems, than the one envisaged by Hart. It will also be argued that the rule of recognition, if subject to a possible (and plausible) reformulation, can nevertheless play a significant, non-redundant role. This, however, will require to assign the rule of recognition a rather different job than the one proposed by Hart, as well as by most post-Hartian positivist literature, namely it will require to locate the rule of recognition not in the theory of the legal system, but in the theory of legal reasoning.