Zurechnung als Kategorie der Allgemeinen Rechtslehre

The concept of attribution plays a pivotal role across all fields of law in the application of legal rules, yet legal scholarship often perceives it as inconsistent and fragmented. Addressing this common observation, the present study adopts a complementary perspective at the level of analytical legal theory, seeking to supplement existing research focused on substantive law. Drawing on the tradition of General Jurisprudence and inspired by the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein, André Nunes Conti concentrates on the formal dimension of legal language in order to contribute to greater conceptual clarity.
Methodologically, the study proceeds in three steps. First, it undertakes a philosophical analysis of the concept, locating attribution both formally and logically within legal norms and pragmatically within legal reasoning and justification. Building on this foundation, the work offers a historical contextualization of the concept through key turning points in legal thought, from Baldus de Ubaldis and Samuel Pufendorf to Hans Kelsen. It demonstrates that the technical concept of attribution rests historically on two equally significant theological paradigms: on the one hand, the freedom-oriented attribution of actions developed in moral theology, and on the other, the chance-oriented attribution to third parties found in Christian doctrines of justification.
Finally, the study applies the resulting concept to contemporary law in order to examine whether it reveals comparable structural patterns across different areas of the legal system. Its scholarly aim is to provide a concept that is formally robust and analytically productive, facilitating the comparative examination of a wide range of legal problems through a balanced combination of conceptual precision and systematic clarity.