Legal positivism maintains a distinction between law as it is and law as it ought to be. In other words, for positivists, a law can be legally valid even if it is immoral. H. L. A. Hart hoped to defend legal positivism against natural law. This paper analyses Hart’s criticism of Gustav Radbruch, a natural lawyer, before suggesting that Hart’s account of legal positivism gives rise to a logical problem. It is concluded that this problem leaves logical space for a (...) theory of natural law based on moral authority rather than legal validity. (shrink)

One of the central debates in legal philosophy is the debate over legal positivism. Roughly, positivists say that law is ultimately grounded in social facts alone, whereas antipositivists say it is ultimately grounded in both social facts and moral facts. In this paper, I argue that philosophers involved in the dispute over legal positivism sometimes employ distinct concepts when they use the term “law” and pick out different things in the world using these concepts. Because of this, what positivists say (...) might well then be true of one thing (e.g., law1) but false of another (e.g., law2). Accepting this thesis does not mean that the philosophers engaged in this dispute are “talking past each other” or engaged in a “merely verbal dispute” that lacks substance. I argue that participants in this dispute are sometimes arguing about what they should mean by the word “law” in the context at hand. This involves putting forward competing proposals about which concept the word “law” should be used to express. This is an issue in what I call “conceptual ethics.” This argument in conceptual ethics can be well worth having, given the connotations that the term “law” plays in many contexts, ranging from legal argument to political philosophy to social-scientific inquiry. Sometimes, I claim, philosophers (and ordinary speakers) engage in such argument tacitly by competing “metalinguistic” usages of the term “law”—usages of the term that express a view (in this case, a normative view) about the meaning of the word itself. In such cases, speakers on different sides of the positivism debate might in fact both speak truly, in terms of the literal (semantic) content of what they both say. Nonetheless, they may disagree in virtue of views in conceptual ethics about “law” that they express through the nonliteral content of what they say. These views in conceptual ethics often reflect further disagreements about issues that are not ultimately about words or concepts. These include foundational ones in ethics and politics about how we should live and what kind of institutions should govern our lives. My metalinguistic account of the dispute over legal positivism better equips us to identify what such issues are and to engage them more fruitfully. (shrink)

The Normative Structure of Responsibility deals with responsibility in legal, moral, and linguistic contexts. The book builds on conceptual analysis and data from everyday language, ethics, and the law in order to defend the thesis that responsibility is fundamentally normative, that is, it cannot be reduced to purely descriptive factors. The book is divided in three parts: the first part draws a conceptual map of various responsibility concepts, conceptions and conditions and their interaction with different kinds of rules; the second (...) part engages with arguments in favour of a descriptive understanding of responsibility based on ethics, neuroscience, and metaphysics and argues against it; the third part investigates the language of responsibility and its use in formal and informal contexts. (shrink)

Brian Leiter’s Why Tolerate Religion? valuably clarifies the issues involved in granting religion-specific accommodations to laws and policies of general application. His arguments are careful, rigorous, and fair, and in rejecting the deontological arguments for religion-specific accommodations he seems to me largely correct. But when he turns to arguing against the utilitarian case for such accommodations, he employs a seemingly non-standard sense of utilitarianism in which demands of principled consistency constrain what would otherwise be utilitarian welfare-maximization. A more traditional and (...) stronger version of utilitarianism, however, has room for seemingly unprincipled or even irrational distinctions as long as employing those distinctions is utility- or welfare-maximizing. And thus although Leiter’s arguments against the deontological justifications for religion-specific accommodations are largely successful, his arguments against utilitarian justifications, by relying more heavily on the notion of “principle” than a utilitarian should accept, are open to challenge. (shrink)

I will center the discussion of the Hart-Fuller debate on the five claims Hart mentions might be understood as legal positivisms main tenets: (1) the command theory; (2) the no necessary connection thesis; (3) the methodological claim; (4) the charge of positivism as formalism and the problem of interpretation; and (5) the meta-ethical confusion. In light of these five claims, I will explore whether the exchange of views between Hart and Fuller in 1957 truly amounted to a debate. Sorting out (...) this issue is the aim of this article. (shrink)

In modern jurisprudence it is taken as axiomatic that John Austin's sanction-based account of law and legal obligation was demolished in H.L.A. Hart's The Concept of Law, but Hart's victory and the deficiencies of the Austinian account may not be so clear. Not only does the alleged linguistic distinction between being obliged and having an obligation fail to provide as much support for the idea of a sanction-independent legal obligation as is commonly thought, but the soundness of Hart's claims, as (...) well as the claims of many legal theorists who have followed him, depend on a contested view of the nature of legal theory. If the task of a theory of law, as Joseph Raz and others have influentially argued, is to identify the essential features of the concept of law, then the theoretical possibility, if not the empirical reality, of a sanction-free legal system is what is most important. But if the task of a theory of law is to provide philosophical and theoretical illumination of law as it exists and as it is experienced, then a theory of law that fails to give a central place to law's coercive reality may for that reason be deficient as a theory of law. The question of the soundness of the Austinian account, therefore, may be a function of the answer to the question of what a theory of law is designed to accomplish. (shrink)

Ratio Juris, Volume 34, Issue 4, Page 331-355, December 2021.

This paper argues for a novel understanding of the relationship between law and coercion. It firstly refutes Kenneth Himma’s claim that the authorisation of coercive enforcement mechanisms is a conceptually necessary feature of law. It then claims that the best way to understand the law is as coercion-apt. The “coercion-aptness” of law is clarified, in part, by appealing to an essential distinction between law and morality: Whereas it can be reasonable for the law to appeal to coercive means in order (...) to motivate compliance, it seems decidedly unreasonable for morality to do so. (shrink)

Hans Kelsen’s purity thesis is the basic methodological principle of the Pure Theory of Law. Indeed, it is no exaggeration to say that virtually everything that is peculiar to Kelsen’s legal theory stems from the purity thesis. This includes Kelsen’s normativism or non‐naturalism and his polemic against various dualisms in legal science. I set out Kelsen’s position on these issues after looking at the nomenclature of purity in his writings as well as the philosophical and contextual sources of purity as (...) he understands them. (shrink)

Con la intención de aclarar el significado de la legalidad y de sus principios, el artículo desarrolla aquellos aspectos de la concepción del derecho de Lon Fuller que demuestran que legalidad y exterminio son incompatibles. Después, cuestiona los planteamientos defendidos por los iuspositivistas en el debate sobre el derecho nazi, porque se basan en una incorrecta identificación entre derecho y orden social, lo que lleva a los iuspositivistas a valorar el derecho exclusivamente en función de su utilidad para el gobernante (...) y no en función de lo que supone para los gobernados. (shrink)

The essay discusses the import of the separability thesis both for legal positivism and for contemporary legal practice. First, the place of the separability thesis in legal positivism will be explored, distinguishing between “standard positivism” and “post‐Hartian positivism.” Then I will consider various kinds of relations between law and morality that are worthy of jurisprudential interest, and explore, from a positivist point of view, what kind of relations between law and morality must be rejected, what kind of such relations should (...) be taken into account, and what kind of such relations are indeed of no import at all. The upshot of this analysis consists in highlighting the distinction between two different dimensions of legal validity (formal validity and material validity respectively), and in pointing out that the positivist separability thesis can apply to formal validity only. On the other hand, when the ascertainment of material validity is at stake, some form of moral reasoning may well be involved (here and now, it isnecessarilyinvolved). The essay concludes with some brief remarks on the persisting importance of the positivist jurisprudential project. (shrink)

A partir da dicotomia entre formalismo jurídico e indeterminação das regras jurídicas, o artigo propõe-se apresentar a perspectiva do filósofo e jurista inglês Herbert Hart sobre o modo de funcionamento das regras em geral e das regras jurídicas em particular. Para tanto, analisa o uso atributivo das regras jurídicas e os diferentes modos pelos quais os agentes dispõem-se diante delas. O positivismo jurídico de Hart é mostrado como simultaneamente crítico com relação à moralidade do direito e contrário ao formalismo e (...) ceticismo no que diz respeito ao uso das regras. (shrink)

In this discussion of Emad Atiq's article "There are No Easy Counterexamples to Legal Anti-Positivism" I pose three challenges to his construction of an Inclusive Anti-positivism. I firstly argue that, contra Atiq, the moral facts that both ground IAP and allow it to satisfy the extensional challenge are sometimes reducible to social facts. In Section II, I briefly discuss internal- and external-to-practice appraisals of legal norms. Finally, in Section III, I touch upon the divergent explanations of legal normativity IAP and (...) positivism offer. (shrink)

This article analyses the work of Martin Loughlin on the nature of public law, and in particular, his ostensibly strident anti-positivism. It is argued that despite this, Loughlin's work can be reconciled with a normative account of legal positivism, based on the work of Jeremy Waldron. The article maintains that Loughlin's account of public law as political jurisprudence is methodologically compatible with, and potentially even substantively complementary to, normative legal positivism. It is ultimately suggested that this reconciliation provides a methodology (...) for public law scholarship which is both positivist and political, and which may offer insight into the subject beyond that which either approach might generate alone. (shrink)

If one were to publish a book some hundred years ago, with the central claim that there was a necessary connection between law and coercion, one would have largely pushed on an open door. And to sa...

Raz holds that necessarily all legal authorities, even de facto authorities, make a claim to legitimate authority. He does not say that legitimacy is a necessary property of law. This view, which I call the claim view, constitutes my focal point in this paper. Many commentators have criticized this view. I discuss and dismiss three critiques of the claim view: the verification critique (the claim view is not empirically confirmed), the legalistic critique (law claims legal authority, not moral authority), and (...) the semantic critique (legal obligations are semantically distinct from moral obligations). I submit that Raz equates the meaning of legal duties with that of moral duties and yet denies that legal statements entail moral propositions. In other words, I distinguish the semantic identity thesis from the semantic entailment thesis. Instead of a semantic interpretation of the claim view, I defend a presuppositional ascription of a general claim to moral authority to authoritative duty‐imposing and normatively committed uses of legal language by official spokesmen. I show that law’s claim to authority does not prove the truth of the sources thesis, because conceptual confusion or insincerity can affect the epistemic reliability of the propositions embodied in the claim, and because blatant immorality can altogether cancel law’s pragmatically presupposed claim to moral authority. I also argue that the claim view can only warrant two qualified versions of exclusive legal positivism, one of which is almost tautological, the other self‐contradictory. Finally, I suggest that exclusive legal positivism cannot be defended on conceptual grounds. (shrink)

It has been remarked that the ‘rupture thesis’ prevails within the Anglo-American legal academy in its understanding of the legal system in Nazi Germany. This article explores the existence and origins of this idea—that ‘Nazi law’ represented an aberration from normal legal-historical development with a point of rupture persisting between it and the ‘normal’ or central concept of law—within jurisprudential discourse in order to illustrate the prevalence of a distorted representation of Nazi law and how this distortion is manifested within (...) the discourse today. An analysis of the treatment of Nazi law in two major 50th anniversary publications about the 1958 Hart–Fuller debate, and a review of representations of the Third Reich within literature from the current discourse, demonstrates that the rupture thesis continues to be reproduced within jurisprudence. An examination of the role of Nazi law in the Hart–Fuller debate itself shows that it can be traced back to the debate, where it was constructed through a combination of conceptual determinism and historical omission. It concludes that the historical Nazi law has great significance for the concept of law, but neither positivism nor natural law has properly theorised the nature of the real Nazi legal system. (shrink)

There is a thesis that legal rules need to be made public because people cannot guide their conduct by rules they cannot know. This thesis has been a mainstay of anti-positivism and the controversy over it continues apace. However, positivism can accommodate the secret laws thesis. The deeper import of the debate over secret laws concerns our understanding of law's nature. In this regard secrecy merits attention as a candidate necessary connection between law and immorality. In addition the mediating role (...) of lawyers as experts in ascertaining the law should be highlighted. It has been widely overlooked despite the fact that lawyers are criterial in Hart's concept of law. (shrink)

El presente trabajo trata de hacer una defensa de una particular versión de positivismo jurídico excluyente como teoría que mejor describe el derecho y sus referencias a la moral. Aunque se reivindica la tesis de las fuentes como la tesis iuspositivista por excelencia, el quid de la defensa se asienta sobre un análisis de los diferentes tipos y conceptos de moral que se consideran relevantes a la hora de la identificación del derecho. La posibilidad del error en el descubrimiento de (...) la moral objetiva deja campo abierto para entender que el derecho no puede quedar determinado por otra cosa que no sean hechos sociales. (shrink)