Abstract

The distinction between norms and normative propositions is a commonplace of analytical legal theory, together with the idea that the latter describe the former. But few authors take care of specifying what the activity of describing norms consists in. This paper is a contribution to that issue, distinguishing different ways of describing legal norms and asking whether some of them are more correct or more useful than others. The paper distinguishes four ways of describing norms and claims that their correctness or usefulness is related to the communication context in which a description is offered: it is the pragmatic interaction of the speakers that determines the required information level and its usefulness for the goals of the participants.