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Legal institutions, legal systems, and the law in general are human artefacts. Not only they are human-dependent entities—a lot of things are human-dependent and are not artefacts, such as pollution—, but they are created by humans as the object and outcome of a specific, intentional process of creation. This is an idea that can be seen as an assumption of both legal positivism and legal realism. Indeed, one could say that these two traditional conceptions decline the same artefactual nature of law in different ways. On the one hand, legal positivism focuses on the fact that law is an artefact created by an authority. On the other hand, legal realism focuses on the fact that law is an artefact, requiring recognition and enforcement to function, and the purpose and plan of which must be continuously adapted through a process of interpretation and re-interpretation.
Of course these artefacts are not built out of arbitrary considerations. Rather, they result from a lot of value problems, conditions of effectiveness, and even political factors that legal institutions cannot but address. Apart from these obvious connections, another possible question is whether the fact that law is an artefact completely rules out its connection with the natural background. Is there a sense in which we can consider legal institutions to be natural, other than artefactual? After all, this was the original intuition of the most ancient among the legal-philosophical conceptions, namely, natural law theory. The idea was, at the outset, that the way in which legal institutions work can be linked with the way in which nature works, that dike could be linked with kosmos, the natural order. Of course, stated in this way, determining if law can be linked to nature turns out to be a very general problem, one that can be addressed in several different ways. For example, all of the studies that aim at a naturalization of law or at a description of law in evolutionary terms can be conceived as studies that link the content of legal institutions with nature, at least in an objective and scientific sense of nature, and much of contemporary scholarship in legal theory is devoted to this side of the problem. But there is another interpretation of the same...