Social and Legal Entities as Phenomena: An Inquiry About the Method of Addressing Boundaries Between Social Ontology and Ontology of Law

This Chapter deals with the ontological problem of classifying entities strictly as social or legal. Therefore, the aim is to find a key of access to the unclear boundaries between social ontology and ontology of law. To do this, this Chapter will adopt a history of philosophy approach, offering an inquiry about the nature and the functioning of social and legal entities. It will appeal to Émile Durkheim’s intuition about social fact, Hans Kelsen’s theory about legal assignment of meaning, and Norberto Bobbio’s remarks on phenomenology applied to social sciences. The argument is that sourcing from sociology, social ontology, philosophy of law and phenomenology could represent a turning point to overcome few limits of the sys tematic ontological classification. In fact, adopting the only ontological perspective on this problem leads the research into the hypothesis whether social ontology is a subset of ontology of law and vice versa. Instead, a broader perspective allows us to grasp the nature of social and legal entities as facts, acts, and phenomena.