Law and Norms

The aim of following paper is to indicate that the notion of Grundnorm, described by Hans Kelsen in second edition of his Pure Theory of Law (Kelsen, 1960), is in fact a necessity in every construction of normative order – understood as a coercive design. I attempt to prove this point by explaining how Kelsen as the founder of legal normativism is making a clear distinction between effectiveness and validity of basic norm, in context of existing legal order. This leads to me to a conclusion, that as long as we presuppose law as methodologically autonomous concecpt, the Grundnorm must be regarded as its integral conditio sine qua non.

Evidence from field and laboratory experiments indicates that a large fraction of the people behave like conditional cooperators in public good games. In this article, I investigate the implications of the existence of both conditional cooperators and egoists for optimal law enforcement strategies. When norms of cooperation exist between conditional cooperators, sanctions set by an authority can be lower than in a “Hobbesian" setting where everybody is egoistic. Moreover, if the authorities have private information about the fraction of egoists in society, low sanctions can be optimal because they signal that there are few defectors and thus “crowd in" trust and cooperation between agents. In social dilemmas where conditional cooperation is an important factor, as is the case in tax compliance, the model provides a rationale for the low observed sanctions in the real world and the mixed evidence on the effectiveness of deterrence.

El presente artículo analiza la relación entre normatividad y realidad en los diferentes períodos históricos del constitucionalismo colombiano, partiendo de ubicar el desarrollo de dicha relación en el contexto europeo, como referente histórico, para luego, en un segundo momento, mirarlo, con sus particularidades y sus connotaciones en el contexto colombiano, partiendo del período de la conquista, y pasando por la independencia y el desarrollo constitucional de los siglos XIX y XX, para terminar analizando cómo se refleja esta relación en la Constitución Política del año 1991.