Beiträge zur Rechtsgeschichte Österreichs 2 / 2013, pp. 363-373, 2014/01/30
recht [durch] setzen - Making Things Legal.
Gesetzgebung und prozessuale Wirklichkeit in den europäischen Rechtstraditionen
The question of the relation between text and normativity is both relevant and of basic importance for jurisprudence: The law has to constantly deal with oral and written texts. And the law is a normative order: statutory regulations contain constitutive or regulative rules which create and shape the status and behaviour of institutions, social groups and individuals. Texts have a normative effect once they claim validity, in other words, once authority is attributed to them. Law can be seen as an entity of texts with a normative effect. Laws medias are language and writ. Hence law encompasses text and normativity by nature. In the conjunction of both, text and normativity, reliable statements about the effect of normativity and the construction of cultural identities to which the law contributes to as a component become possible. After the ‘linguistic turn’ and the ‘hermeneutical turn’ – both ‘turns’ contributed substantially to differentiating between language and text – it is time to ask for the “normative power of textuality”.
