Arbitrage sans arbitre: le role nomotrophique des joueurs

Some sports are frequently played, in informal contexts, without a referee or an official scorer. Who is entitled to and responsible for the correct enforcement of the laws of the game in such contexts? The paper suggests that the entitlement to and responsibility for the enforcement of the laws of the game, understood as the ascription of “ludic value” (such as “goal” or “foul”, for instance) to events in the play, is “distributed” among the players themselves. If the players would not take upon themselves this responsibility, many laws of the game would probably atrophy and fade away into desuetude. Through the interpretation of relevant passages on the effectiveness of norms by H.L.A. Hart, H. Kelsen and N. Luhmann, the hypothesis is suggested that in many contexts every player has its own part of “nomotrophic” responsibility – the responsibility to react to violations of the rules or laws of a game in order to prevent them from atrophying and fading away. Law itself is frequently “played” in the absence of a judge: in this perspective, the idea is challenged that “law is what the courts say it is”, and the hypothesis is suggested that a widespread sense of nomotrophic responsibility is needed to contrast phenomena such as collusion.