The Organisation of the Law-State

Abstract

A legal organisation is the set of all organs that belong to a legal order and are obligatory according to the legal system of that order. A particular organ belonging to a legal organisation I call an “authority”. Authorities are systems of legal relations (positions). Authorities have inter alia the properties of being normative relations and institutions. An authority has an internal structure of relations, relations to other authorities within the legal organisation and to private persons “outside” the legal order (the public). Six typical functions of legal organisations are presented and used for the purpose of investigating how a law-state should be organised in order to efficiently contribute to the realisation of the law-state values. On the basis of that I formulate a number of properties, pertaining to authorities, which I regard as conditions for the fulfilment of this task: permanence, internal co-ordination, internal control, independent exercise of authority, control by means of appeal, control by means of judicial review, control by means of legal responsibility, visibility, accessibility, external independence—and, perhaps most important of all, a separation of powers between the organs of a legal organisation. In so doing, I make an extension of classic separation of powers doctrines concerning the highest state organs to the whole of the legal organisation.