Weber, Fuller, and Belief in the Legitimacy of Law

Abstract: By what means are legitimate legal orders maintained? Weber described legitimacy as resting, in part, upon a ‘belief’ in legal authority. Two principal ways of understanding Weber’s description of legitimate law have been offered to date. The first ascribes to Weber an empty formality that is satisfied merely by the fact that law is duly enacted in accordance with rules previously laid down. The second reads Weber’s legitimate law as founded upon a normativity that is appealing to law’s subjects. There are, according to this second reading, reasons that sustain the legitimacy of legality rather than merely the fact of procedural correctness. This essay offers up a reading of Weber that leans in the direction of a modestly normative account and which navigates between these two poles. So as to elucidate this aspect of Weber’s legal sociology, Weberian legitimacy is contrasted with a selection of Lon Fuller’s criteria of legality. To be regarded a system of law, a number of formal characteristics specified by Fuller must be satisfied, among them, generality and predictability. It is upon these procedural grounds that Fuller claims to have infused law with an internal morality. If Weber’s and Fuller’s ideal characteristics of law overlap, then Weber, too, can be treated as having subscribed to a distinctive moral view of law.