metalegaladj.

1944 Philos. Rev. 53 31 The principle of Equality itself does not tell us who are equals and who are not; it presupposes..that this has already been settled according to some standards which in themselves are not part of the principle of Equality but are rather ‘metalegal’ in nature.

1955 Amer. Jrnl. Internat. Law 49 276 Nor is the internment of civilians, since the first World War, contrary to international law, although it is judged from a meta-legal point of view to be ‘wholly retrograde’.

1959 S. I. Benn & R. S. Peters Social Princ. & Democratic State iii. 58 What criteria must a rule satisfy to be a valid law?.. How are legal rules related to particular decisions..? These questions..involve analysis of the formal structure of a legal system, and of the relation between norms of different levels of generality; they might be termed metalegal questions.

1971 G. Schwarzenberger Internat. Law iv. 29 Alleged rules of international jus cogens which are based on no other evidence than postulates of natural law or other metalegal norms must be ignored on the level of lex lata.

1988 Jrnl. Higher Educ. 59 705 A judge has no meta-legal system that will enable him or her to reconcile a conflict of laws in a particular situation.