Georg Henrik von Wright. Deontic Logic and Logic of (legal) norms

No doubt that von Wright's deontic logic has been a radical innovative contribution to philosophical logics in the variety of their developments in the second half of last century. Nevertheless, despite the great interest for his calculi among legal logicians and legal theorists, (standard) deontic calculi do not provide a suitable means to capture the logical behaviour (if any) of (the formulations of) legal norms. This is the conclusion of von Wright himself, after fifty years of researches and reformulations of his (standard) calculi. The very same negative conclusion towards the explicative power of deontic logic with regard of any allegedly logical behaviour of legal norms holds good nowadays in front of a configuration of law which does not match anymore the traditional model of a legal order.