Leon Petrażycki on Norms and Their Logical Study

Abstract

In this paper we discuss L. Petrażycki’s idea of norm as a normative relation and show its repercussions in two perspectives connected to each other, in the legal theory in the framework of which it was originally introduced and where its role was straightforward, and in logic where it played a shadowy role of a fresh idea which in his expectation would have been the core of the novel logical theories capable of modelling reasoning in law and morals. We pay attention to the scholarly environment in which Petrażycki has proposed those ideas and to the unlucky fate of his academic legacy which is now being rediscovered.