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A successful account of the 'normativity of law' is meant to inter alia establish how legal requirements come to be morally binding. This question presupposes taking a stance on the metaethical debate about the nature of morality and moral bindingness between the cognitivist and non-cognitivist camps. An overwhelming majority of contemporary legal philosophers have an unspoken adherence to a cognitivist metaethic and the model of normativity of law emerging from it: the impinging model. Consequently, the problematic of the normativity of law is so calibrated as to in limine rule out any putative account of the normativity of law that presupposes a non-cognitivist metaethic: the projectivist model. This paper calls for a recalibration of the problematic of the normativity of law to a metaethically aseptic viewpoint from which the projectivist model is seen as a plausible theoretical contender to the impinging model. It also sets out the philosophical underpinnings of the projectivist model and contrasts it from the impinging model.

Euclidian theories have it that there exist one or a small number of apex principles from which the entire fasciculus of rules of contract law can be logically deduced. Two arguments are marshalled against the Euclidian project. First, that it has been unsuccessfully attempted before – in the form of the nineteenth century contract law treatise which emulated the civil lawyer's rationalistic model, mos geometricus – cautioning us against setting much store by its present reincarnation. Second, that the common law's methodology makes it resistant to this form of theorising. Euclidian theory presupposes a picture of rules on which: a) cases involve an application of logically prior rules; b) rules are reliably identifiable by different actors in the legal system; and c) rules normatively range over an indefinite spectrum of future cases. It will be argued that the common law defies this picture of rules thus rendering Euclidian theory analytically impossible.

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