Brute presuppositions and institutional presuppositions: an attempt to broaden the Marek Smolak’s notion of the presupposition of legal text

Abstract

In the paper, the author comments on some ideas recently presented by Marek Smolak. The aim of the paper is to define the notions of ‘brute presupposition’ and ‘institutional presupposition’ of legal texts. In the first section three main issues of the theory of law where the category of presupposition has been applied are indicated. They are as follows: the notion of obligation, the reflecting of reality in directives, and the reading of legal texts at different levels of meaning. In the second section the notion ‘brute presupposition’ is defined and its potential usefulness in jurisprudence is investigated. The analyses show that the usefulness of the semiotic category of presupposition is, for several reasons, quite limited in the theory of law. Nevertheless, the notions of brute and institutional presupposition may be of some heuristic use when one wishes to define the place of the history of law among other historical studies.