Normative Hierarchy in International Law

Abstract

Systems of law usually establish a hierarchy of norms based on the particular source from which the norms derive. In national legal systems, it is commonplace for the fundamental values of society to be given constitutional status and afforded precedence in the event of a conflict with norms enacted by legislation or adopted by administrative regulation; administrative rules themselves must conform to legislative mandates, while written law usually takes precedence over unwritten law and legal norms prevail over nonlegal (political or moral) rules. Norms of equal status must be balanced and reconciled to the extent possible. The mode of legal reasoning applied in practice is thus naturally hierarchical, establishing relationships and order between normative statements and levels of authority.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 274 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.