What Is an Inquiry into the Nature of Law? A Debate on Raz's Metaphysical Approach

Abstract In 2007 Marcial Pons published in Spanish a debate between Joseph Raz, Robert Alexy, and Eugenio Bulygin that is now being made available in English in this special issue of Ratio Juris . This article revisits that debate by unpacking the way Raz conceives of the relation between a concept and the nature of a thing, on the premise that this is key to understanding what is here characterised as his “metaphysical proposal,” meaning the priority of metaphysical inquiry into the nature of law: We can only identify a concept as a concept of law by reference to law's essential properties. The explanatory direction runs from nature to concept, and in this sense Raz can be understood as rejecting the idea that an inquiry into the nature of law reduces to conceptual analysis.