Principles in legal explanations

One could think that asking to what extent principles enable us to explain what law in general, a legal order in particular, or a sector of such an order, is amounts to placing the question in the context of a legal science (with its diffe­rent levels of abstraction).

Now, principles have that explanatory function in at least two senses. First of all, because they can synthesize great quantities of information: refer­ence to a few principles enables us to understand how a legal institution works, within the legal order as a whole and with respect to the social system. Princi­ples — like scientific laws — are sentences facilitating a parsimonious descrip­tion of some sector of reality (in this case, of the law); thus, they fulfil a didac­tic function, in a wide sense, of great importance. But secondly, and this is even more important, principles also enable us to understand the law — or different legal systems — not just as simple sets of standards, but as ordered sets, that is, sets that somehow make sense. Hence, if we know the principles of an institu­tion or of some legal system we can even, to some extent, predict the solutions given to certain legal problems by specific provisions. This double capacity of principles, to present a part (or the whole) of a legal order in a succinct and or­dered way, is precisely the capacity to what is usually called the systematiza­tion of the law. And since systematization is generally assumed to be the main function of legal science, principles obviously play a fundamental role here.

Although, of course, we do not want to deny this, we think it is important to stress that legal science — or, more precisely, what is usually called 'legal dogmatics' — is a normative discipline, and this not only in the obvious sense that its objects are norms, but also in two other senses (probably just as ob­vious, although this has not always been seen), namely: in the sense that its point of view is a normative one (the point of view of legal dogmatics is not an external point of view with respect to the norms) and in the sense that it has a function that could be called 'normative', since legal dogmatics does not restrict itself to the description of valid norms, but also proposes or suggests criteria for

the solution of legal problems. In our view, in legal dogmatics, the systematiza­tion of a certain normative material is a central task, but not an end in itself; rather, it is a means for performing its most relevant social function: that of providing criteria for the application, interpretation and modification of the law. Actually, what characterizes legal dogmatics is not so much — or at least not only — its explanatory function, but rather its justificatory function.

3.2.