The idea that particular legal institutions are artifacts is not new. However, the idea that the “law” or “legal system” is itself an artifact has seldom been directly put forward, due perhaps to the ambiguities surrounding philosophical inquiries into law. Nevertheless, such an idea has recently been invoked more often, though not always developed in detail in terms of what the characterization of the “law” or “legal system” as an artifact entails ontologically, and what consequences, if any, this has for philosophical accounts of law. As a result, the primary aim of this paper is to attempt an inquiry into what the claim that “law” by its nature or character is an artifact entails, and what an artifact theory of law might look like.

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This chapter claims that legal systems are abstract institutional artifacts and that as such they existentially or ontologically depend on collective intentionality in the form of (a we-mode) collective recognition. It argues that this recognition, as a social practice accompanied with its participants’ particular attitude toward it, constitutes a social norm by which a group of people collectively imposes an institutional status of officials or make it the case that an institutional status of legal system exists. It further claims that legal systems often emerge gradually from standing rudimentary pre-legal practices which may be said to create the context in which social norms of recognition can emerge. Finally, it argues that the actual existence of a legal system depends on whether or not the content of collective recognition was largely successfully realized, which is manifested precisely in people actually using a legal system, i.e., in their social (legal) practices.

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