Abstract

The essay aims at distinguishing the notions of effectiveness, efficacy and efficiency of legal norms, assuming that norms are the interpretive or argumentative content of legal provisions. The work claims that effectiveness and efficacy are conceptually independent notions, and the same holds for effectiveness and efficiency. Instead, efficacy and efficiency stand in this relationship: the latter implies the former, but not vice versa; that is to say, there can be norms that are efficacious but inefficient, whereas for conceptual reasons it is impossible to have an efficient but inefficacious norm.