My 59 theses on legal rationalism make up the core of my forthcoming book Visión lógica del Derecho: Una defensa del racionalismo jurídico [A logical view of Law: In support of legal rationalism] (ISBN 978-84-17121-06-8, Madrid: Plaza y Valdés, 2017). (http://www.plazayvaldes.es/libro/vision-logica-del-derecho) The 59 theses provide an answer to the question «What is Law?»: Law is a set of normative situations necessarily arising in any society (whether human or nonhuman) in order for living and working together to be possible. Such a set is necessarily closed as regards certain relations, that are inference rules, one of which is that from any normative situation whatever it follows that the common good is mandatory. Indeed the function of that set of normative situations is to secure the common good and the inferential relations are the ones fitting for achieving that aim. Legal rationalism is a variety of Natural Law theory, which implies a thorough rejection of legal positivism. Nevertheless, this is an additive legal positivism, not a subtracting one, which means that being rationally conducive to the common good is a sufficient but not a necessary condition for being a validly legal norm. Contingent social sources of law are genuine norm-origininators, too.

This is a summary of the main contents of the forthcoming book VISIÓN LÓGICA DEL DERECHO: UNA DEFENSA DEL RACIONALISMO JURÍDICO (Plaza y Valdés, 2017)

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