La realtà del diritto in Luis Cabral de Moncada

What is the nature of legal reality? This essay analyses the answer to this ontological question framed by the Portuguese legal philosopher Luis Cabral de Moncada (1888-1974). For Moncada, legal reality has essentially a semantic nature, since meaning is an essential component of legal reality. According to Moncada, legal reality comprises a pre-legal substratum and a legal meaning. In particular, legal realities are realities referring to certain values which assign them a particular meaning. This idea of the semantic nature of law is also present in three other theories of law: (i) Emil Lask's philosophy of law(1905), (ii) Czeslaw Znamierowski's social ontology (1924) and (iii) Hans Kelsen's pure theory of law (1934)