Coming soon...

...but no so soon. First I could introduce myself a little. I am a student of law at Charles University in Prague, Czech Republic, but currently I'm studying at the University of Ghent in Belgium. I'd like to say a few words about my interests. I'm interested in legal philosophy (discussion between natural law and legal positivism, economic analysis of law), legal theory (torts), Austrian economics (especially methodology) and ethics (virtue ethics plus metaethics). 

So, the question you might be asking yourself is what the heck is praxeology and what it has to do with law. Well, praxeology is the study of those aspects of action that can be grasped a priori or it could be also defined as the complete formal analysis of human action in all its aspects. Human action is purposeful behaviour which means that people apply means to attain their ends. Praxeology is closely linked to so-called Austrian economics. According to the Austrian school, economics is an apriori science, not empirical. This means that there are certain propositions about human action that can be understood without going outside and doing empirical research. Those propositions need not be tested and as such cannot be verified or falsified. They are derived from the action axiom by way of deduction. If we have true premises and don't make any miskate in the process of deduction, we arrive at absolutely true conclusions. An example of this can be the concept of costs: "as a consequence of having to choose and give preference to one goal over another—of not being able to realize all goals simultaneously—each and every action implies the incurrence of costs, i.e., forsaking the value attached to the most highly ranking alternative goal that cannot be realized or whose realization must be deferred, because the means necessary to attain it are bound up in the production of another, even more highly valued goal". (Hoppe, ESAM)

Having said this, I can now proceed to the second part of the question: Does praxeology have anything to do with the law? I believe so. The question may be phrased differently: Are there some propositions about the law which can be grasped apriori? Yes, there are. Just think about the concepts of self-ownership, property rights, obligations, and so on. I'm not implying that the entire body of law could be derived from the action axiom. All I'm saying is that  some basic legal principles can be given apriori justification. I am not sure whether the concepts of adverse possession or easements are derivable from the basic praxeological axiom but, as I think, these concepts prove necessary in the modern legal systems. So I would propose some sort of a two-tier theory of law. But I still need to think it through...

Another important question in this respect is about the place of morality in such a theory. I'm not going to give you the answer now. Honestly, I don't know the answer. But this may be the subject of one of the next posts in the future.

As regards what I'm reading now, the next post will probably be about the concept of efficiency in the economic analysis of law (in three weeks :-/ )

P.S.: I'm not an English native speaker, so I apologise for the mistakes I may have made.