One Word, Four Objects
Ask what law is and you will get four distinct answers. Spanish and Catalan make this trap sharper, because derecho and dret carry every sense at once.
| Sense | The question it answers | Where you look | The discipline |
|---|---|---|---|
| Law as norm | What does the law say? | The BOE, the codes | Legal dogmatics |
| Law as fact | What do officials and citizens actually do? | Courts, registries, police stations | Sociology of law |
| Law as value | Is this arrangement just? | Arguments, not documents | Philosophy of law |
| Law as knowledge | How do jurists organise and argue about it? | Doctrine, method, teaching | Legal theory |
Objective and Subjective Right
A second ambiguity sits underneath the first:
- Objective right: the body of valid norms. Legal rules belong here.
- Subjective right: a claim protected by those norms. The individual holds this power.
English splits these into law and a right.
Law as Fact: Realism
Legal realism argues that practice matters more than written books.
Alf Ross, in the Scandinavian tradition, analysed validity as the probability that courts will actually apply a norm.
Law as Value
Whether value belongs inside the definition of law divides theorists:
- Natural-law views hold that an unjust rule is not genuine law.
- In contrast, legal positivism treats validity and moral worth as entirely separate questions.
Common pitfall: Confusing the four senses. "Is bribery illegal?" is a question of norms. "Does it happen?" is a question of fact. Answering the first with a statistic changes the subject.