Sources of Law
2
Jaap Hage
The question whether a particular rule is also a legal rule can have a large practical
importance because the answer may determine whether the rule will be enforced by
state organs. Lawyers have developed a number of standards to determine whether
a rule has the status of law, and these standards are known as the sources of law. In
this chapter, we will take a closer look at these sources of law. More particularly, we
will address the following questions: what is a source of law (Sects.2.1and2.2),
and which sources of law are recognized (Sects.2.3–2.7)?
2.1 Sources of Origin
The idea that legal rules always stem from a source may derive some of its
plausibility from the fact that the notion of a legal source is ambiguous. There are
legal sources in at least two senses of the term “legal source”:
- sources of origin,
- sources of legal validity.
Apart from sources of origin and sources of validity, it is possible to distinguish “knowl-
edge sources.” Some sources can be used to find out what the law is. For instance, by
inspecting the texts of treaties, legislation, judicial decisions, and doctrinal literature, one
can find out what the content of the law is.Customary Law The notion of a source of origin is closely related to the different
ways in which legal rules and principles can exist. We have seen in Chap. 1 that law
was originally customary law, that the law consisted of rules that were in fact used
and accepted as binding. For this reason, customary law is usually seen as a source
J. Hage (*)
Maastricht European Private Law Institute (M-EPLI), Maastricht University, Maastricht,
The Netherlands
e-mail:[email protected]
J. Hage and B. Akkermans (eds.),Introduction to Law,
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-06910-4_2,#Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2014
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