Exploring the Nature of Law : Thomistic Juridical Realism and the Elements of Law's Ontology

This is a book about the nature of the reality or the phenomenon referred to as "law" by lawyers and legal officials, but also by members of communities living under law, to the extent that they conceptualize the realm of "law" as something sufficiently distinguishable from other different or broader realities and phenomena. The book belongs to the legal-philosophical field dedicated to the study of the very nature of law, that is, to the most basic or abstract part of the philosophy of law, which is sometimes referred to as "the philosophy of philosophy of law" or "general jurisprudence." The scope of the book is to explore the essential features of law’s nature, namely, all those realities that pertain to law’s essence, the properties that make law into what it is.Despite the fact of plurality of legal-philosophical conceptions of law circulating in legal theory today, the book is optimistic about the very prospect of exploring the nature of law.It maintains that law has an essence a