Law, continuity and rupture

Abstract

This article intends to analyze the foundations of the Modern Law under the vectors of continuity and rupture, which mark its dialectical structure. From the study of historical and theoretical elements of revolution and, in more detail, the French Revolution, we intend to demonstrate the importance of the idea of discontinuity to the genesis of Law in the Modern Age. With the new model of Law, the concept of legal certainty would be put as the key to demand both a normative and institutional setting as well as a structural thinking in order to support it. Under the sign of legal positivism, the primacy given to the formal foundations of the system completed by ensuring the dialectic of continuity and discontinuity, paving the way for the dramatic phenomena occurred during the Second World War. Since then, a broad movement has been trying to rethink the law in order to rescue the new dimensions of legal rationality. We will also try to investigate how this movement, known as postpositivism, can contribute to a new understanding of the dialectic between continuity and rupture in the Modern Law.

Key words: continuity, rupture, revolution, French Revolution, Modern Law, rationality, legal certainty.