In this paper I analyze Bulygin’s conception of those legal statements asserting
that a certain action is legally obligatory, prohibited or permitted. According
to Bulygin these statements are ambiguous. On the one hand, they can affirm the
existence or validity of a legal norm in a descriptive sense. In this case they are external
statements expressing empirical propositions. On the other hand, they can
assert the existence or validity of a norm in an absolute or moral sense, in which
case, they are internal (neither true nor false) statements that express a norm or
a moral attitude towards it. In the paper I attempt to defend that for a positivist
theory, if law is conceived as a set of norms, statements asserting that a certain action
is legally permitted or prohibited do not report an empirical fact but do not
report the moral or absolute validity of a norm either. They surely assert a normative
fact: the legal existence or validity of a normative entity. Nevertheless, this
sense of existence or validity depend on human behavior and is relative to a given
time and place. I take into account four considerations presented by Bulygin in
support of his rejection of this kind of statements expressing internal, normative
proposition. In my view, Bulygin’s rejection is fundamentally due to his strict
conception of what it means to assume an internal point of view but, even more,
it is due to the admission of a false dichotomy between two ways in which an
entity can exist: one empirical (relative), the other normative (absolute). In order
to criticize this apparent dichotomy, I briefly sketch a constructivist conception
in which we can say that legal norms exist. If my reasoning is correct, this conception
is one that a positivist legal theory can offer in order to explain internal
statements expressing normative facts or propositions.