This book provides a realist and structural account of legal systems grounded in Basic Formal Ontology (BFO), phenomenology, and legal philosophy. It applies ontology to the domain of law, arguing that legal structures are not merely normative systems but ontological artifacts; real institutional continuants that emerge from patterns of obligation, recognition, and procedure.

The book begins with a reappraisal of traditional jurisprudential debates among natural law, legal positivist, and legal realist scholars, showing that each fails to fully account for the ontological reality of legal objects. Drawing on the work of Dworkin, Reinach, Hart, and others, the book shows how the BFO framework clarifies the relations among roles, processes, facts, and institutions, thereby allowing a formal representation of how legal objects come into being through institutional acts. The central claim is that law is not reducible to will, command, or convention; it is a structured domain of social reality that arises wherever agents engage in acts of recognition that create enduring roles and obligations. Courts, legislatures, and other institutional entities are modeled as repair nodes that stabilize relational fields by resolving contradiction and sustaining normative coherence. In this way, law is shown to be both ontologically grounded and dynamically open, capable of collapse or repair depending on the integrity of its structures. The later chapters examine applications of this framework to AI and digital jurisprudence, property ontology, and institutional legitimacy, showing how the same relational principles that define moral obligation can model the persistence of law in democratic and authoritarian regimes alike.  As a whole, the book  argues for a new foundation for jurisprudence - one that sees law as a structural mode of being-with that is stabilized in legal objects and institutions, rather than a mere social contract or linguistic construct.

A Structural Ontology of the Law is essential reading for all scholars, researchers and advanced students of the philosophy of law. It is also of interest to scholars of the philosophy of technology.

David R. Koepsell is Instructional Associate Professor of Philosophy at Texas A&M University and Research Associate at the University at Buffalo’s Ontology Research Group. His previous books include Innovation and Nanotechnology (2011), Who Owns You? (2009), and The Ontology of Cyberspace (2000).