Nevertheless, whereas a believable case can be made in favor of Bix’s view, the long history of construing Aquinas and Blackstone as conceptual naturalists, along with its pedagogical value in growing other theories of law, ensures that this follow is probably going, for better or worse, to proceed indefinitely.
In other words, the distinction between authorized normativity and, say, ethical normativity, shouldn’t be a difference in normativity (viz, concerning the nature of normativity, per se), however solely in the relevant vantage point that’s determined by their different basic norms.
And thus the thought of legal validity, as Kelsen admits, is closely tied to this reality of a social observe; a legal system exists, as it have been, only as a social reality, a actuality that consists in the fact that people really comply with sure norms.
It is binding over all the globe, in all nations, and at all times: no human legal guidelines are of any validity, if contrary to this; and such of them as are legitimate derive all their force, and all their authority, mediately or instantly, from this authentic” (1979, 41).