ONTOLOGY AND LAW. "EXISTENTIALISM" AND INSTITUTIONALISM

The analytical theory of law has long been hostile to any attempt to "realistic" definition of law. The charge of "essentialism" was the most terrible and feared; the one that marked more a perspective as insufficient. However, as repeated Alexy, referring to Kant, the definition is the appropriate representation of its object, so it seems inevitably to have a "realistic" character. Nominalism does not refer to concepts wanting to be "true" or "appropriate". So, for example, Joseph Raz rejects the Hartian idea, derived from Wittgenstein, of concepts as "family resemblances" and takes a strongly essentialist position. So does John Finnis, and any discussion of inclusive or exclusive positivism. The price of such development is the abandonment of the internal point of view; too high price as it forgets the character of participatory practice of law itself. Neoinstitucionalism could be a solution to the choice between essentialism and nominalism as reinterprets the concept of law, not as "essence" but as "existence", as action space open by standards and completed by variable behaviors.