Special Workshop Abstracts

Special Workshop Title:	Law, Morality, Politics, Defeasibility
Author:	Lennart Åqvist, Department of Law, Uppsala University
Paper Title:	Some Remarks on Performatives in the Law
Abstract:	In his 1973 doctoral dissertation Åke Frändberg points out that a characteristic feature of legal rules and norms is that they often contain a so-called performative component: by means of speech acts (e.g. judgments, decisions) the legal official (“functionary”) – enjoined by the legislator – issues norms addressed to citizens or to other officials. Frändberg explains the difficult concept / phenomenon of performativity in a very straightforward way by asking his readers initially to consider an interesting list of examples, or example sentences, some of which appear to be performatives in a ‘received’ sense, while others do not so appear. In my paper I first discuss some well-known questions concerning performatives, which form a sort of background to Frändberg’s presentation of them and which are actualized by that presentation, e.g. the following: Of what kind of entities is performativity a property? sentence-types[-gestalts] – sentence-tokens – utterances (pronouncements) of sentence-types; or what? Another problem is a familiar Austinian one: Can we find a uniform, purely grammatical-syntactic criterion of the performativity of sentences in a natural language like English or Swedish, which yields precisely the results desired by Frändberg? I then go on to deal with Frändberg’s positive contribution to the doctrine of performatives, especially as they are used in the law. This will constitute the bulk of the paper. Finally, in a concluding Appendix, we try to illustrate the role and function of the fascinating little word “hereby”, which word serves as an almost decisive criterion of the performativity of verbs and sentences. We do so by quoting three illuminating passages from the rich literature on the subject, viz. from von Wright, Hedenius and myself.