TFL Vsebine / Revija Revus

Coercion and the Nature of Law, by Kenneth Himma, claims to be an essay in descriptive conceptual analysis and there are good reasons to also take it as an essay in legal positivism. These amount to and imply certain methodological commitments. In this article I explore the compatibility between such commitments and Himma’s elaboration on the conceptual relation between law and coercion. The result will be that those commitments are not thoroughly honoured, as Himma’s argument moves from the descriptive to the normative when making the case for law’s “conceptual” function being peacekeeping and when fleshing out what sort of reasons for action the law provides.