@article{TEXTUAL,
      recid = {14660},
      author = {Ramsauer, Laurenz},
      title = {The Efficacy Problem},
      journal = {Legal Theory},
      address = {2025-02-24},
      number = {TEXTUAL},
      abstract = {Legal theorists agree widely on two necessary and jointly  sufficient conditions for the existence of a legal system:  a legal system exists if (i) legal officials adopt a  critically reflective attitude toward the legal system’s  foundational rule, and (ii) the substantive laws of the  system are “by and large” efficacious. The latter “efficacy  condition” plausibly applies to all posited law,  paradigmatically including modern centralized legal systems  and less paradigmatic instances like international law. And  yet, philosophers have also frequently pointed out the  difficulty in determining precisely what this efficacy  amounts to. In this article, I argue that the persisting  difficulty of explaining the efficacy of law results from  three tempting but inadequate assumptions about posited law  and that our basic assumptions need to be revised  accordingly.},
      url = {http://knowledge.uchicago.edu/record/14660},
}