Does Law Exist Ideally? Lorenz Kaehler's Ontology of Law Revisited

A.B. Didikin

2026

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DOI 10.51634/2307-5201_2026_3_104
Data confidence 70 medium
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Abstract

The relevance of the topic of this paper is due to the insufficient study of Lorenz Kaehler's new legal theory of the ideal dimension of law in contemporary philosophy of law.The problem considered in the paper is the philosophical justification of the ontological ideality thesis, according to which legal norms exist as abstract propositional entities independent of any of their physical or institutional characteristics.The subject of the research is the analysis of Kaehler's arguments distinguishing the claim to correctness thesis, legal ideality, and ontological ideality, together with his critique of Robert Alexy's discourse theoretical account of law's ideal dimension and his relation to Gustav Radbruch's formula on statutory lawlessness.The purpose of the work is to theoretically reconstruct and critically assess Kaehler's ontological argument for the ideal dimension of law from the perspective of the legal positivism and other approaches in legal philosophy.The novelty of the topic is due to the lack of critical studies in the modern scientific papers examining Kaehler's paper What Is the Ideal Dimension of Law? and the related debate initiated by Vitaly Ogleznev on the modal and epistemic status of ontologically ideal legal entities, as well as the need to rethink Kaehler's terminology of "ontological ideality" from a social fact based legal argumentation perspective.The research methods used in the paper are those characteristic of analytical jurisprudence, including methods of logical and conceptual analysis, comparative legal analysis, and critical textual interpretation of primary philosophical sources.The main conclusions of the paper are to reveal the key arguments of Kaehler's ontological ideality thesis and to demonstrate their limitations: it is argued that Kaehler's objections to the claim to correctness thesis are largely persuasive, but his positive ontological thesis, modelled on abstract objects such as numbers, Fregean thoughts, or Popper's "world 3" is not adequately supported by the examples he offers, and that these examples are better explained by a modest positivist account according to which law persists through copies, institutional memory, and interpretive communities rather than through an independent immaterial realm of propositional legal content.