What is legal validity and is it important?

some critical remarks about the legal status of soft law

pp. 125-144

in: Pauline Westerman, Jaap Hage, Stephan Kirste, Anne R. Mackor (eds), Legal validity and soft law, Berlin, Springer, 2018

Abstract

In this chapter, I shall be concerned with the question what legal validity is and why it is important. The first part of the chapter is devoted to an analysis of the notion of validity, which allows us to answer the question what it means to say that a rule is or is not legally valid. In the second part, I argue that legal validity has practical importance. I illustrate my claim by discussing the legal status of a particular kind of soft law, viz. two Dutch codes of conduct for the judiciary.