Sobre la completitud de los sistemas jurídicos

this paper analyses five different ways of understanding completeness as an ideal of legal systems. in doing so it essentially relies on the thesis discussed by carlos alchourrón regarding this subject. the paper stresses the need to distinguish (1) the criteria for the identification of the legally relevant texts, (2) the methods or rules that justify the passage from a content c to another content c1 and, (3) the criteria for the identification of valid norms belonging to the system. according to the dominant conception in legal theory, the rules of logic justify the passage from a content to another; such rules, however, are not accepted as membership criteria. this means that the notion of system that legal theorists use to organize the law is not the notion of a deductive system. in this conception the ideal of absolute completeness is a logically possible ideal. the conclusion reached in the article is that there are only two ways of understanding the ideal of "plenitude" or absolute completeness of a legal system: in a formalist view, through the introduction of residual rules of closure, or, in a moralistic view, by accepting critical morality as a criterium for legal validity.