Intermediaries and intervenients in normative systems

Many concepts in legal texts are “intermediaries”, in the sense that they serve as links between statements of legal grounds, on one hand, and of legal consequences, on the other. In our paper, an algebraic representation of normative systems is used for distinguishing between different kinds of intermediaries and making the idea of a joining between grounds and consequences more precise.In Section 1, the idea of intermediaries is presented and earlier discussions of the subjects are outlined. In Section 2, we introduce the algebraic framework and develop the formal theory. After introducing our approach to the representation of a normative system, we here present a theory of “intervenients”, seen as a tool for analysing intermediaries. In Section 3, dealing with applications, after presenting a model of the formal theory, suited for the analysis of concepts in normative systems, we apply the theory to a number of examples, introduced in the first part. Finally, in Section 4, we make some remarks on the methodology of intermediate concepts.