Eliot Wing Chung Kwok has posted Enforcement and Definition on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
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Is enforcement necessary to law? Joshua Kleinfeld’s claim in his article Enforcement and the Concept of Law that the existence of law despite the lack of perfect enforcement proves that enforcement is not strictly necessary involves circular reasoning. Likewise, the theory he proposes as an explanation for enforcement not being strictly necessary to law, namely that law belongs to a class of social objects with a normative constitution, leads to circular reasoning. In light of these problems, this paper argues that law may have different definitions none of which can be in-and-of-itself more correct than any other, which would mean that the validity of any claim about law could only be relative to its definition.
