Although sanctions are a constant presence on law systems around the world, the analytic philosophers of law neglected this subject for a long time. The reason is that sanctions were though as an unnecessary element to explain legal normativity. However, law is better explained by the observation of what is understood as its important features and not by its necessary and sufficient ones. If the work of those philosophers its to conceptualize or to describe the legal phenomenon, or to provide normative material, they must comprehend features that are presents in almost every legal system. Following this line of thought, this study is an interdisciplinary approach to sanctions. The sanctions are usually used as incentives for rules observance. Experiments made of economic games have confirmed the efficiency of this method. There are, nevertheless, cases in which sanctions make the opposite result that is expected. As much as rules have a positive value for society, the study about the way people understand the use of sanctions can help improve legal production. Despite the normative debate, psychological studies are pointing to a retributivist tendency in folk people punitive judgments. Besides that, psychology has showed some asymmetries in punitive behavior. The philosopher of law should make an effort to integrate different information in order to provide more accurate explanations to the legal phenomenon and create more feasible normative theories.