Janik Bartosz, An explanatory framework for legal grounding

Some legal scholars want to know what lies in the real, fundamental layer of legal reality. The primary assumption of their analysis is usually that there are social and legal facts and there is a substantial difference between these two, meaning that there is no easy way of reducing the legal facts to social facts. This might be due to the normativity of the legal facts. Bearing this in mind, the problem of legal fundamentality and reality boils down to the analysis of the relationship between the legal and the social facts, or, in other words, the apparently non-reductive relationship between the social facts and the legal facts.

For the sake of argument about the fundamentality of relations in the legal domain, we can assume that social facts and legal facts are well defined, while the fundamental level for analyzing legal ontology is social ontology. This means that, for the legal domain and for the explanation of the legal facts, those social facts are cannot be further analyzed....