Soru

In the mid-twentieth century, the Scandinavian legal realist movement—most prominently articulated by Karl Olivecrona and Alf Ross—launched a radical assault on traditional jurisprudence by challenging the ontological reality of "legal rights." Influenced by logical positivism, Ross famously illustrated this critique through an allegory of the imaginary "tû-tû" concept from an isolated tribe: a word believed to denote a mystical state created by violating taboos and resulting in ritual punishment. Ross argued that the concept of a "right" (such as ownership) operates in modern law identically to "tû-tû." In Ross's view, ownership corresponds to no empirical entity; it is merely an empty conceptual junction connecting a bundle of conditioning facts (such as purchase, inheritance, or gift) to a bundle of legal consequences (such as the entitlement to exclude others, sell, or claim damages). Because rights correspond to no observable phenomena in the physical world, the realists contended that legal discourse was burdened by lingering magical thinking and superstitious metaphysics.

Concluding that the vocabulary of rights was an epistemologically bankrupt residue of natural law, some radical realists proposed purging such terminology entirely, suggesting that legal statutes should directly link factual antecedents to enforceable remedies. Yet this eliminationist prescription fails to appreciate the profound structural necessity of intermediate legal concepts. Even if rights lack empirical referents, their elimination would precipitate catastrophic cognitive and logistical friction across modern legal systems. As subsequent legal theorists have demonstrated, rights terms perform a critical connective and informational function. If an economy possesses $m$ distinct methods of acquiring property and $n$ legal remedies available to an owner, a system employing the intermediate concept of "ownership" requires only $m + n$ discrete legal rules. In contrast, an eliminationist legal code that maps each specific acquisition mechanism directly to every individual legal remedy would require $m \times n$ separate rules.

Thus, the Scandinavian realists' foundational insight—that rights do not denote metaphysical substances—does not justify their normative conclusion that rights discourse should be abandoned. Rather than being dispensable illusions, rights concepts operate as indispensable syntactic reduction mechanisms and coordinating tools that render vast webs of normative relations computationally manageable for human institutions. The enduring persistence of rights language reflects not an attachment to mystical ontology, but an inescapable requirement of practical legal efficiency.

Based on the passage above, what is the author's primary purpose in discussing the concept of legal rights?