Approaches to legal certainty. A reconstruction proposal

Abstract

The article formulates a proposal for a metatheoretical ordering of the different discussions on what legal certainty is. It distinguishes between justificatory discussions, conceptual discussions, and institutional discussions. Each of these groups offers conceptual precisions and requirements that make it necessary, for any jurist, to make explicit the commitments adopted when formulating theorisations or prescriptive judgements that claim to derive from or seek to optimise legal certainty in a given legal system.