Reinach believed that basic legal concepts exist, that their existence is independent of the positive law, and their existence is independent of moral obligation. In this idiosyncratic juxtaposition of positions, Reinach is joined by contemporary theorists drawing on evolutionary psychology and cognitive science in jurisprudence. But Reinach emphatically insisted that his claims were ontological, not psychological. This chapter explains why. For Reinach himself, the ontological status of legal concepts was one front in a broader debate over whether basic mathematical and logical concepts were true a priori or features of human psychology; a demonstrative project in the breadth of the a priori. But it is suggested that today’s theorists need not be as preoccupied with this distinction as Reinach was. Not only is the practical difference between ontological and evolutionary theories not as wide as Reinach seems to have assumed, but arguments for metaphysical reality in other domains are substantially less persuasive as applied to Reinach’s legal concepts.

The aim of this chapter is to explore different possible ways of thinking about the connection between the nature of contractual agreements and the rich array of notions that comprise the structure of contract formation. It starts from one axiom regarding the nature of contracts: contractual obligations and rights are necessarily brought about by both parties’ assents (the ‘Necessity of Agreement’ axiom or ‘NOA’). It is maintained that if we adopt NOA, there are at least two different mechanisms by which contracting agents may form a contractual agreement. One is well known to anyone familiar with modern contract law: ‘offer and acceptance’. The other has been interestingly neglected by most contract lawyers and theorists: ‘contractual subscription’. The notion of contractual subscription is developed, and then discussion of the concepts of offer and acceptance. Drawing on Reinach’s idea of a ‘social act’, an account of ‘juridical acts’ is provided. Juridical acts, it is argued, are a type of social act, and contractual offers are a type of juridical act. Finally, the role of another important notion in contract formation is analyzed, that of a ‘promise’. Contrary to several contemporary writers, it is held that the act of making a promise, in its elementary form at least, is neither necessary nor sufficient for the formation of a contract. The chapter concludes by offering a thesis regarding the connection between NOA and morality of contractual enforcement.

In this chapter, the focus is on negative states of affairs, on their corresponding judgments, and on the connection of these with Reinach’s jurisprudence – something that has not yet been done in the extant literature on him. The position advanced is that it is because the law frequently turns on what appears to be negative states of affairs; Reinach’s legal training may have contributed to his insistence on their very being and their having the same ontological status as positive states of affairs. Reinach was rather unique in the Munich and Göttingen phenomenological circles because he was a law student in addition to being a student of descriptive psychology and phenomenology; the ways he combined the various teachings from these fields opened up for him distinctive ways of seeing the world – in all its modes of being and not being. Consequences of the position include restoring these entities to their rightful place in his ontology (negative states of affairs have received far too little attention and serious inclusion in his work) and the potential for making Reinach whole again – by bridging his early law education with his phenomenological ontology.

Hohfeld’s and Reinach’s ontologies of rights have rarely been compared. After having highlighted the similarities between them, the focus is on what is arguably their most fundamental disagreement. Hohfeld assumes from the outset that all rights are relations, and consequently claims that all liberties have correlatives, which he calls, for lack of a better term, “no-rights”. Reinach, for his part, maintains that liberties, unlike claims, essentially lack correlatives and counterparts, which is why he calls them “absolute rights”. Who is right? Do liberties have correlatives or not? It is argued that both Reinach and Hohfeld have overgeneralized an initially correct insight. Reinach is right, pace Hohfeld, that some liberties are absolute, but wrong that all are. Hohfeld is right, pace Reinach, that some liberties have no-rights as correlatives, but wrong that all liberties have such correlatives. A reconciled ontology of rights is proposed that makes room for both absolute and relative liberties.

This chapter considers the extent to which the concepts recognised in the positive private law are answerable to concepts that exist outside of the law and in what ways the justification of positive private law rests upon its relationship to normative facts that exist independently of it. Reinach prompts reflection on these matters in that he directs his attention to a set of abstract entities (rights, claims etc.), and propositions relating those entities (a priori laws) which, he claims, do not owe their validity to the positive law, but exist in the same way as mathematical objects and truths. In this way, he goes beyond the positive law, and in a subtle sense to be explored, considers the positive law answerable to the a priori law.