What Does the Law Say?

Abstract

The killings of George Floyd and Rayshard Brooks raise the highly pertinent question: What is law in these cases? The more one reflects on the nature of the legal order in a well-ordered society, the closer one arrives at Justice Holmes’ statement: “The prophecies of what the courts will do in fact, and nothing more pretentious, are what I mean by the law”. A similar approach to the question above was delivered by Dane Alf Ross (1899-1979), who expounded in a succinct form so called Scandinavian Law Realism.