One barrel only: on the comprehensively coercive nature of the law

Most contemporary legal positivists accept the following two claims: first, that the law does not as a matter of conceptual necessity authorise or permit or the use of force, and second, that even if it does authorise or permit such use, most of the things it does have nothing to do with the permission of force. In this paper I argue that both these claims are mistaken. This results in two counterclaims: first, that the law necessarily permits the use of force, and second, that the law comprehensively does so. This second claim is the stronger and more unusual claim. It argues that whereas the law does indeed do many things other than permitting the use of force – like giving reasons, directing, incentivising, proposing, offering, empowering, etc. – it does all of these by means of permitting the use of force. Working out the corollaries of this second claim will prompt us to shift our understanding of how the law goes about directing action and what kind of authority it is.