Waluchow on Institutional Forces of Law

The chapter examines the idea of institutional forces of law, introduced by Wil Waluchow in Inclusive Legal Positivism. This concept is presented in Waluchow’s theory to clarify Ronald Dworkin’s suggestion that a theory of law must provide an account about the justification of state coercion. Waluchow argues that law has different kinds of institutional forces operating on judges and officials, which leads him to reject Dworkin’s defense of a moral justification of coercion as a necessary part of a theory of the nature of law. Therefore, he concludes that it is one thing to say that a proposition is legally valid, and it is quite another to say that it is mandatory for judges. However, Waluchow gave no clear responses to two important questions related to that idea. First, given the various connections between institutional forces of law and the problem of the grounds of law, as a matter of a theory of law, it raises the question of whether these concepts are truly separate. Second, since the problem of the force of law is a matter of legal normativity, it leads us to inquire about Waluchow’s explanation for the rise of legal obligations and the role of coercion in his concept of law. This paper concludes that any successful theory about the nature of law must also have an account of the institutional forces of law, at least at a minimum level that could describe how the law is obligatory for judges or citizens once we cannot conceive the law as merely a suggestion or advice.