<p>An ambiguity haunts the modern concept of positive law: it is contingent law and posited law — contingent <i>because</i> posited law. In the face of this ambiguity, the question about the <i>emergence</i> of legal normativity becomes urgent: how to make sense of the normativity of lawmaking if Kelsen’s basic norm, social contract theories, and discursive theories of law are not up to the task of addressing this question? Drawing on Husserl’s and Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of the lived body, this paper explores how the ‘is/ought’ distinction in law emerges through abnormal disruptions of the norm of legal normality. Abnormalities render the norm of legal normality thematic in the mode of contingency: what appears ought to appear otherwise than expected, challenging the expectations that have governed what ‘we’ take ourselves to be — the very experience that leads to foregrounding the distinction between ‘is’ and ‘ought’. Even if the normal world is neither grounded nor groundable, abnormal occurrences can give way to the emergence of legal normativity as the creation of the given.</p>