In jurisprudence and legal philosophy, legal positivism is the theory that the existence of the law and its content depend on social facts, such as acts of legislation, judicial decisions, and customs, rather than on morality. This contrasts with natural law theory, which holds that law is necessarily connected to morality in such a way that any law that contradicts morality lacks legal validity.
Thomas Hobbes defined law as the command of the sovereign. This idea was elaborated in the 18th and 19th centuries by legal philosophers such as Jeremy Bentham and John Austin, who argued that a law is valid not because it is intrinsically moral or just, but because it comes from the sovereign, is generally obeyed by the people, and is backed up by sanctions. Hans Kelsen developed legal positivism further by separating law not only from morality, as the early positivists did, but also from empirical facts, introducing the concept of a norm as an "ought" statement as distinct from a factual "is" statement. In Kelsen's view, the validity of a legal norm derives from a higher norm, creating a hierarchy that ultimately rests on a "basic norm": this basic norm, not the sovereign, is the ultimate source of legal authority.
In addition to Kelsen, other prominent legal positivists of the 20th century include H. L. A. Hart and Joseph Raz.
The term positivism in legal positivism is connected to the sense of the verb to posit rather than the sense of positive (as opposed to negative). In this sense, the term positivism is derived from Latin positus, the past participle of ponere, meaning "to place" or "to put".[ citation needed ] Legal positivism holds that laws are rules established (that is, "posited") by human beings, and that this act of positing the law makes it authoritative and binding. [1] [ better source needed ]
According to the positivist view, the source of a law is its enactment or recognition by a legal authority that is socially accepted and capable of enforcing its rules. The merits of a law are a separate issue from its legal validity: a law may be morally wrong or undesirable, but if it has been enacted by a legal authority with the power to do so, it is still a valid law.
Leslie Green summarises the distinction between merit and source: "The fact that a policy would be just, wise, efficient, or prudent is never sufficient reason for thinking that it is actually the law, and the fact that it is unjust, unwise, inefficient or imprudent is never sufficient reason for doubting it. According to positivism, law is a matter of what has been posited (ordered, decided, practiced, tolerated, etc.); as we might say in a more modern idiom, positivism is the view that law is a social construction." [1]
Legal positivism does not claim that the laws so identified should be obeyed, or that there is necessarily value in having clear, identifiable rules (although some positivists may also make these claims). Indeed, the laws of a legal system may be quite unjust, and the government may be illegitimate; as a result, there may be no obligation to obey the law. Moreover, the fact that a law has been found to be valid by a court does not mean that the court should apply it in a particular case. As John Gardner has said, legal positivism is "normatively inert". [2] It is a theory of law, not a theory of legal practice, adjudication, or political obligation, and legal positivists generally maintain that intellectual clarity is best achieved by separating these issues for independent analysis.
Analytical jurisprudence often distinguishes between two types of legal positivism: inclusive and exclusive legal positivism. The former accepts, whereas the latter denies, that there may be cases in which determining what the law is follows from considerations about what the law ought to be according to morality. [3]
Both qualify as legal positivism because they share two basic tenets. First, the "social thesis": law is essentially a human creation and therefore its content is ultimately determined by social facts, such as acts of legislation, judicial decisions, and customs. Second, the "separation thesis": law and morality are conceptually distinct phenomena and therefore a norm can belong to the law even if is unjust or unfair. [4] [5]
On the bedrock of these two shared assumptions, the two theories differ in their interpretation of how morality might influence law.
According to inclusive legal positivism (also called "soft positivism") it is possible that the criteria for identifying valid laws in a given legal system (that is, in Hart's terminology, its "rule of recognition") incorporate moral standards. In other words, while law and morality are conceptually distinct, a particular legal system might, as a matter of fact, make the validity of some laws dependent on their moral merit. Typically, this happens when a constitution includes a clause requiring laws to respect human rights, or human dignity, or equality, thus incorporating some moral standard into the legal system. Conformity with moral principle may be a condition of legal validity. [4] However, this is not necessarily the case, but is contingent upon the content of the law and its rule of recognition, which may or may not include moral standards. Inclusive legal positivism has been embraced or defended by authors such as Jules Coleman, Matthew Kramer, Wil Waluchow, and H. L. A. Hart himself. [6]
According to exclusive legal positivism ("hard positivism") the validity of a law is never determined by its moral content, but depends only on its source (e.g., being enacted by a legislature) and its compliance with the legal system's formal procedures. Therefore, if the constitution reference moral principles, these principles are not incorporated into the law as moral standards but rather the constitution is authorising the judges and the other law-applying institutions to develop and modify the law by resorting to moral reasoning. [6] Conformity with moral principle is necessarily not a condition of legal validity. [4] Exclusive legal positivism is mainly associated with the name of Joseph Raz and has been advocated by authors such as Brian Leiter, Andrei Marmor and Scott Shapiro. [7]
To sum up, inclusive positivism allows for the possibility that morality can play a role in determining legal validity in some legal systems, while exclusive positivism holds that morality can never be a direct criterion for legal validity, even if a legal system references moral concepts.
In 1961 Norberto Bobbio argued that the phrase "legal positivism" is used with three different meanings, referring to different and largely independent doctrines, which he called "positivism as a way of approaching the study of law" (methodological legal positivism), "positivism as a theory or conception of law" (theoretical legal positivism) and "positivism as an ideology of justice" (Ideological legal positivism). [8] [9]
Methodological legal positivism is a value-free, scientific approach to the study of law and, at the same time, is a way of conceiving the object of legal knowledge. It is characterised by a sharp distinction between real law and ideal law (or "law as fact" and "law as value", "law as it is" and "law as it should be") and by the conviction that legal science should be concerned with the former.
Theoretical legal positivism is a cluster of theories about the nature of law related to a "statalist" conception of law. [10] They include the theory that the law is a set of commands issued by the sovereign authority, whose binding force is guaranteed by the threat of sanctions (coercitive imperativism); a theory of legal sources, in which statute law enjoys supremacy (legalism); a theory of the legal order, which is supposed to be a complete and coherent system of norms, free of gaps (lacunae) and contradictions (antinomies); and a theory of legal interpretation, conceived of as a pure act of cognition: a mechanical and logical activity.
Finally, ideological legal positivism is defined by Bobbio as the normative theory according to which positive law ought to be obeyed (ethical legalism). [11] [10] [12]
Sometimes the term 'positivist' is used in a pejorative sense to condemn a doctrine according to which the law is always clear (legal formalism) and, however unjust, must be strictly enforced by officials and obeyed by subjects (so-called 'ideological positivism'). [1] [10] [11] When identified with legal formalism, legal positivism is opposed to legal realism. Legal positivism, understood as formalism, believes that in most cases the law provides definite guidance to its subjects and to judges; legal realists, on the other hand, often embrace rule scepticism, claiming that legal rules are indeterminate and do not constrain judicial discretion. [13] However, both legal positivism and legal realism believe that law is a human construct. Moreover, most realists adopted some version of the positivist doctrine of the separation of law and morality. [14]
According to Brian Leiter, the view that positivism and realism are incompatible positions is probably largely due to Hart's critique of legal realism, [15] but American legal realists were "tacit legal positivists" who acknowledged that all law stems from authoritative sources such as statutes and precedents. [16] Most legal realists denied the existence of natural law, had a scientific approach to the law based on the distinction between describing and evaluating the law, and denied the existence of an objective (moral or political) obligation to obey the law; they therefore qualified as legal positivists. [11]
Legal positivism in Germany was famously rejected by Gustav Radbruch in 1946 where prosecution of Nazi supporters faced a challenge of assessing actions that had complied with Nazi law. In what has come to be known as the Radbruch formula, he argued that in general an unjust law must be recognised as law, "unless the conflict between statute and justice reaches such an intolerable degree that the statute, as 'flawed law', must yield to justice" or, more precisely: "Where there is not even an attempt at justice, where equality, the core of justice, is deliberately betrayed in the issuance of positive law, then the statute is not merely 'flawed law', it lacks completely the very nature of law." [17]
The main antecedent of legal positivism is empiricism, the thinkers of which range back as far as Sextus Empiricus, Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, George Berkeley, David Hume, and Auguste Comte. The main idea of empiricism is the claim that all knowledge of fact must be validated by sense experience or be inferred from propositions derived unambiguously from sense data. Further, empiricism is in opposition to metaphysics; for instance, Hume rejected metaphysics as mere speculation beyond what can be learnt from sense experience. [18] The teachings of the empiricists preceded systemization of a positivist method for problems of comprehension and analysis, which was later represented by legal positivism. [19]
Traditionally, positivist theories of law have been developed by theorists applying the method of conceptual analysis to determine what is 'natural to say'. [20] This approach assumes that legal concepts, being 'settled by the classificatory machinery of human thought', are 'amenable only to philosophical … reflection'. [21] Recently, researchers in the emerging field of experimental jurisprudence have challenged this assumption by exploring the relation between law and morality through systematic, psychological investigations of folk legal concepts. [22] [23]
Legal positivism is related to empiricist and logical positivist theoretical traditions. Its methods include descriptive investigations of particular legal orders. Peter Curzon wrote that this approach "utilizes in its investigations the inductive method" which proceeds "from observation of particular facts to generalizations concerning all such facts." [19] These investigations eschew assessments of ethics, social welfare, and morality. As Julius Stone wrote, legal positivist investigation is concerned primarily with "an analysis of legal terms, and an inquiry into the logical interrelations of legal propositions". [24] Further, law and its authority are framed as source-based: the validity of a legal norm depends not on its moral value, but on the sources determined by a social community's rules and conventions. [19] This source-based conception aligns with the logical positivism of Rudolf Carnap, who rejected metaphysical conjecture about the nature of reality beyond observable events.
Thomas Hobbes, in his seminal work Leviathan , offered the first detailed theory of law as based on sovereign power. As Jean Elizabeth Hampton writes, "law is understood [by Hobbes] to depend on the sovereign's will. No matter what a law's content, no matter how unjust it seems, if it has been commanded by the sovereign, then and only then is it law." [25] There is, however, debate surrounding Hobbes's status as a legal positivist. [25] [26] [27]
The English jurist and philosopher Jeremy Bentham was arguably the greatest British legal positivist. In An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, Bentham developed a theory of law as the expressed will of a sovereign. In 'A Fragment on Government', Bentham distinguished between the following types of people:
The philosophy of law, considered strictly, was to explain the real laws of the expositors, rather than the criticisms of the censors.
Bentham is also noted for terming natural rights "nonsense upon stilts". [29] [30]
John Austin partly emulated Bentham by writing The Province of Jurisprudence Determined . [31] However, Austin differed from Bentham in a number of ways, as, for example, by endorsing the common law.
Differences aside, Austin embraced Hobbes's and Bentham's conception of law as a sovereign command, whose authority is recognised by most members of a society; the authority of which is enforced by the use of sanctions, but which is not bound by any human superior. The criterion for validity of a legal rule in such a society is that it has the warrant of the sovereign and will be enforced by the sovereign power and its agents.
The three main tenets of Austin's command theory are:
Austin considered law to be commands from a sovereign that are enforced by a threat of sanction. In determining 'a sovereign', Austin recognised it is one whom society obeys habitually. This sovereign can be a single person or a collective sovereign such as Parliament, with a number of individuals, with each having various authoritative powers. Austin's theory is also somewhat brief in his explanations of Constitutions, International Law, non-sanctioned rules, or law that gives rights. Insofar as non-sanctioned rules and laws that allow persons to do things, such as contract law, Austin said that failure to obey the rules does result in sanctions; however, such sanctions are in the form of "the sanction of nullity".
The British legal positivism hitherto mentioned was founded on empiricism; by contrast, legal positivism was founded on the transcendental idealism of the German philosopher Immanuel Kant. Whereas British legal positivists regard law as distinct from morals, their Germanic counterparts regard law as separate from both fact and morals. The most famous proponent of Germanic legal positivism is Hans Kelsen,[ original research? ] whose thesis of legal positivism is explained by Suri Ratnapala, who writes:
The key elements of Kelsen's theory are these.... A norm, unlike a fact, is not about what there is but is about what ought to be done or not done. Whereas facts exist in the physical world, norms exist in the world of ideas. Facts are caused by other facts. Norms are imputed by other norms. The requirement that a person who commits theft ought to be punished is a norm. It does not cease being a norm because the thief is not punished. (He may not get caught.) The norm that the thief ought to be punished exists because another norm says so. Not all norms are laws. There are also moral norms. Legal norms are coercive; moral norms are not. [32] [ excessive quote ]
From this framework, Kelsen opined that the regression of validated norms cannot go on infinitely and must arrive at a first cause, which he called a 'basic norm' (German : Grundnorm). The legal system is therefore a system of legal norms connected to one another by their common origin, like the branches and leaves of a tree.
For Kelsen, "sovereignty" was an arbitrary concept: "We can derive, however, from this concept of sovereignty only what we have purposely put into its definition". [33] Kelsen attracted disciples among scholars of public law worldwide. These disciples developed schools of thought to extend his theories, such as the Vienna School in Austria and the Brno School in Czechoslovakia. In English-speaking countries, H. L. A. Hart and Joseph Raz are perhaps the best-known authors who were influenced by Kelsen, though their legal philosophies differed from Kelsen's theories in several respects.
Hart approved of Austin's theory of a sovereign but claimed that Austin's command theory failed in several important respects. Among the ideas Hart developed in The Concept of Law (1961) are:
In 1958, Hart analyzed descriptions or definitions as given by different proponents of legal positivism as including one or more of these five contentions in different combinations:
Historically, legal positivism is in opposition to natural law's theories of jurisprudence, with particular disagreement surrounding the natural law claim that there is a necessary connection between law and morality.[ citation needed ]
A pupil of Hart's, Joseph Raz was important in continuing Hart's arguments of legal positivism after Hart's death. This included editing in 1994 a second edition of Hart's The Concept of Law, with an additional section including Hart's responses to other philosophers' criticisms of his work. [35]
Raz also argued, contrary to Hart, [35] that the validity of a law can never depend on its morality. [36]
Jurisprudence, also known as theory of law or philosophy of law, is the examination in a general perspective of what law is and what it ought to be. It investigates issues such as the definition of law; legal validity; legal norms and values; as well as the relationship between law and other fields of study, including economics, ethics, history, sociology, and political philosophy.
Ronald Myles Dworkin was an American legal philosopher, jurist, and scholar of United States constitutional law. At the time of his death, he was Frank Henry Sommer Professor of Law and Philosophy at New York University and Professor of Jurisprudence at University College London. Dworkin had taught previously at Yale Law School and the University of Oxford, where he was the Professor of Jurisprudence, successor to philosopher H. L. A. Hart.
Herbert Lionel Adolphus Hart was an English legal philosopher. One of the most influential legal theorists of the 20th century, he was instrumental in the development of the theory of legal positivism, which was popularised by his book, The Concept of Law. Hart's contributions focused on the nature of law, the relationship between law and morality, and the analysis of legal rules and systems, introducing concepts such as the "rule of recognition" that have shaped modern legal thought.
Lon Luvois Fuller was an American legal philosopher best known as a proponent of a secular and procedural form of natural law theory. Fuller was a professor of law at Harvard Law School for many years, and is noted in American law for his contributions to both jurisprudence and the law of contracts. His 1958 debate with the British legal philosopher H. L. A. Hart in the Harvard Law Review was important in framing the modern conflict between legal positivism and natural law theory. In his widely discussed 1964 book The Morality of Law, Fuller argues that all systems of law contain an "internal morality" that imposes on individuals a presumptive obligation of obedience. Robert S. Summers said in 1984: "Fuller was one of the four most important American legal theorists of the last hundred years".
John Austin was an English legal theorist who posthumously influenced British and American law with an analytical approach to jurisprudence and a theory of legal positivism. Austin opposed traditional approaches of "natural law", arguing against any need for connections between law and morality. Human legal systems, he claimed, can and should be studied in an empirical, value-free way.
Hans Kelsen was an Austrian jurist, legal philosopher and political philosopher. He was the principal architect of the 1920 Austrian Constitution, which with amendments is still in operation. Due to the rise of totalitarianism in Austria, Kelsen left for Germany in 1930 but was forced out of his university post after the Nazi seizure of power in 1933 because of his Jewish ancestry. That year he left for Geneva and in 1940 he moved to the United States. In 1934, Roscoe Pound lauded Kelsen as "undoubtedly the leading jurist of the time". While in Vienna, Kelsen met Sigmund Freud and his circle, and wrote on social psychology and sociology.
Pure Theory of Law is a book by jurist and legal theorist Hans Kelsen, first published in German in 1934 as Reine Rechtslehre, and in 1960 in a much revised and expanded edition. The latter was translated into English in 1967 as Pure Theory of Law. The title is the name of his general theory of law, Reine Rechtslehre.
The Concept of Law is a 1961 book by the legal philosopher H. L. A. Hart and his most famous work. The Concept of Law presents Hart's theory of legal positivism—the view that laws are rules made by humans and that there is no inherent or necessary connection between law and morality—within the framework of analytic philosophy. Hart sought to provide a theory of descriptive sociology and analytical jurisprudence. The book addresses a number of traditional jurisprudential topics such as the nature of law, whether laws are rules, and the relation between law and morality. Hart answers these by placing law into a social context while at the same time leaving the capability for rigorous analysis of legal terms, which in effect "awakened English jurisprudence from its comfortable slumbers".
Positive laws are human-made laws that oblige or specify an action. Positive law also describes the establishment of specific rights for an individual or group. Etymologically, the name derives from the verb to posit.
Joseph Raz was an Israeli legal, moral and political philosopher. He was an advocate of legal positivism and is known for his conception of perfectionist liberalism. Raz spent most of his career as a professor of philosophy of law at Balliol College, Oxford, and was latterly a part-time professor of law at Columbia University Law School and a part-time professor at King's College London. He received the Tang Prize in Rule of Law in 2018.
Leslie John Green is a Scottish-Canadian legal scholar specialising in jurisprudence. He is Professor of the Philosophy of Law and Fellow of Balliol College, Oxford University, and Professor of Law and Distinguished Faculty Fellow at Queen's University, Kingston. A legal positivist, his research also focuses on political philosophy and constitutional theory.
The Hart–Fuller debate is an exchange between the American law professor Lon L. Fuller and his English counterpart H. L. A. Hart, published in the Harvard Law Review in 1958 on morality and law, which demonstrated the divide between the positivist and natural law philosophy. Hart took the positivist view in arguing that morality and law were separate. Fuller's reply argued for morality as the source of law's binding power.
Articles in social and political philosophy include:
Natural Law and Natural Rights is a book by John Finnis first published by Oxford University Press, as part of the Clarendon Law Series. Finnis develops a philosophy of Law in the tradition of Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas – Natural Law. His presentation and defence of Natural Law can be explored from three perspectives. First, polemical, by contradistinction with other philosophies of Law. Second, through its particular methodology, based on practical reasoning. Third, through its substantive content in the form of basic human goods. In addition, his 2011 edition included an extensive postscript, which is briefly discussed in the fourth section. The book is written as a collection of essays on a wide range of topics guided by an overall theme.
This is an index of articles in jurisprudence.
Analytical jurisprudence is a philosophical approach to law that draws on the resources of modern analytical philosophy to try to understand its nature. Since the boundaries of analytical philosophy are somewhat vague, it is difficult to say how far it extends. H. L. A. Hart was probably the most influential writer in the modern school of analytical jurisprudence, though its history goes back at least to Jeremy Bentham.
Jurisprudence of values or jurisprudence of principles is a school of legal philosophy. This school represents, according to some authors, a step in overcoming the contradictions of legal positivism and, for this reason, it has been considered by some authors as a post-positivism school. Jurisprudence of values is referred to in various works all over the world.
Theory of Legal Norms is a book, published in 1958, by the Italian jurist Norberto Bobbio about one of the ontological elements of foundations of law — the legal norm.
A legal norm is a binding rule or principle, or norm, that organisations of sovereign power promulgate and enforce in order to regulate social relations. Legal norms determine the rights and duties of individuals who are the subjects of legal relations within the governing jurisdiction at a given point in time. Competent state authorities issue and publish basic aspects of legal norms through a collection of laws that individuals under that government must abide by, which is further guaranteed by state coercion. There are two categories of legal norms: normativity, which regulates the conduct of people, and generality, which is binding on an indefinite number of people and cases. Diplomatic and legislative immunity refers to instances where legal norms are constructed to be targeted towards a minority and are specifically only binding on them, such as soldiers and public officials.
Experimental jurisprudence (X-Jur) is an emerging field of legal scholarship that explores the nature of legal phenomena through psychological investigations of legal concepts. The field departs from traditional analytic legal philosophy in its ambition to elucidate common intuitions in a systematic fashion employing the methods of social science. Equally, unlike research in legal psychology, X-Jur emphasises the philosophical implications of its findings, such as whether, how, and in what respects the law's content is a matter of moral perspective. Whereas some legal theorists have welcomed X-Jur's emergence, others have expressed reservations about the contributions it seeks to make.