Trevor N. Wedman seeks to understand the key assumptions underlying
modern legal theory. Going back to Hobbes, but also making use of the
developments in the theory of action and language philosophy over the
past century, he breaks down the static conception of the state into one
dependent on the actions and reflections of individuals, i.e., its
citizens. He develops a social ontological theory of the law, in which
the law is not taken as a mere given, but as an institutional fact. He
criticizes both the Kelsenian conception of the Basic Norm and the
Hartian notion of the Rule of Recognition as failing to account for the
agency of individuals. The author turns to the work of one of Kelsen's
contemporaries, Felix Somlo, in order to develop an alternative
conception of the law that operates not from the top down, but from the
bottom up. In this way, the law itself comes into focus as that which
results from the reasoned jurisprudential reflection on the reality of
meanings and actions.