Norma, obbligo e sanzione. Una rilettura di alcune nozioni giuridiche a partire dalla pragmatica di Robert Brandom

The essay aims at providing a new understanding of legal obligation after Robert Brandom’s pragmatics. In the first part, after summarizing two opposite interpretations of the notion of legal obligation, I will introduce the elements of Brandom’s semantic theory and suggest a way to apply these ideas to law. Then, I will discuss the relation between norms and deontic attitudes. I will conclude that within Brandom’s framework there is no room for conceiving of shared norms. In the second part, I will attempt to provide some suggestions about how to accommodate certain specific features of law.