IVR Central Asia Regional Branch Special Workshop – Nature of Law and Legal Reality

SW 70-IVR Central Asia Regional Branch Special Workshop – Nature of Law and Legal Reality

Convenors: Anton Didikin;Maqsut Narikbayev University

Contact: a_didikin@kazguu.kz; abdidikin@mail.kz

 

The workshop “Nature of Law and Legal Reality” explores how contemporary legal philosophy and jurisprudence understand what law is and how legal phenomena exist in social and empirical reality. It is designed as an intensive discussion where participants reconsider classical debates in the philosophy of law in light of new empirical, ontological, and interdisciplinary developments.

In recent decades, debates about the nature of law have shifted from a simple opposition between legal positivism and natural law theory toward a more diversified landscape that includes interpretivism, non‑positivism, metaethics and another views on correlation of law and morality. Scholars no longer ask only whether legal validity depends on moral merits, but also how moral, social, and institutional facts together constitute legal norms as part of complex normative practices.

At the same time, several authors have questioned whether it even makes sense to speak of a single, fixed “nature of law.” This “demarcation problem” in jurisprudence challenges the idea that law has a set of necessary and sufficient features that hold across all times and places, and instead encourages approaches that emphasize family resemblances, common characteristics, or context‑dependent functions.

Finally, there has been an “empirical turn” in legal theory and scholarship. This movement seeks to connect conceptual analysis with empirical investigation of how legal institutions actually function, how actors interpret norms in practice, and how law interacts with social, economic, and psychological factors. The workshop situates itself at this intersection of conceptual, ontological, and empirical approaches.

The workshop aims to bring together philosophers of law, legal theorists, doctrinal scholars to articulate more refined accounts of both the nature of law and the structure of legal reality. By confronting traditional jurisprudential questions with contemporary disputes about ontology, pluralism, and empirical method, participants will seek to map promising directions for future research and to clarify what is at stake in ongoing controversies.

Topics for discussion include, among others:

(1) Concept and nature of law

– What do we mean when we claim that law has a “nature”: are we identifying essential properties, common patterns, or merely theoretical constructs?

– Is it still plausible to think that philosophy of law must provide necessary and sufficient conditions for the existence of legal systems, or should we adopt more modest, pluralistic, or practice‑oriented frameworks?

– How should we understand the relationship between law and morality today: as strict separation, necessary connection, or context‑sensitive interaction between moral and institutional facts?

(2) Legal Reality and Ontology

– In what sense do legal entities—rights, duties, persons, corporate bodies, or digital assets—“exist,” and how does their mode of existence differ from that of physical objects or social conventions?

– How do courts and other legal actors exercise “ontological discretion” when they choose among competing ways of construing the reality of contested objects such as death, incapacity, or intoxication?

– Can we speak of multiple, overlapping legal realities generated by different legal orders and epistemic communities, and if so, how do these realities interact in transnational or pluralist settings?

(3) Legal Methodology and Interdisciplinarity

– What is the proper role of conceptual analysis in contemporary legal theory when empirical, sociological, and psychological research increasingly shape our understanding of law in action?

– How can philosophy of law integrate insights from empirical legal studies, new legal realism, and social ontology without losing its distinctive normative and analytical focus?

– To what extent should theories of the nature of law be evaluated not only on their internal coherence, but also on their explanatory power regarding actual institutional practices and disputes about legal reality?

 

Prospective participants are invited to submit abstracts (500–1000 words) by 15 May to a_didikin@kazguu.kz and abdidikin@mail.kz.

To facilitate discussion, participants are warmly encouraged to circulate a final paper by 1 June 2026.