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)

Prominent analytical jurisprudents assert that a theory of law consists of necessary, universal truths about the nature of law. This often-repeated claim, which has not been systematically established, is critically examined in this essay. I begin with the distinction between natural kinds and social artifacts, drawing on the philosophy of society to show that necessity claims about law require a fundamental reworking of basic understandings of ontology and epistemology, which legal philosophers have not undertaken. I show law is a poor (...) fit for a priori and a posteriori knowledge. I distinguish between universal application and universal truth, showing the former is sound while the latter is not. I expose the implications that follow from the initial selection of the central case of law, demonstrating that this choice must be justified, and I reveal two ways analytical jurisprudents shield their theories of law from refutation. This analysis raises significant doubts about the claim by analytical jurisprudents that they are identifying necessary, universal truths about the nature of law. (shrink)

The goal of this paper is to provide an accurate grounding-based formulation of positivism in the philosophy of law. I start off by discussing some simple formulations, based on the ideas that social facts are always either full or partial grounds of legal facts. I then raise a number of objections against these definitions: the full grounding proposal rules out possibilities that are compatible with positivism; the partial grounding proposal fails, on its own, to vindicate the distinctive role that is (...) played by social facts within positivist accounts of law. Then, I present a more adequate and insightful formulation capable of solving their problems, which crucially relies on a robust notion of a social enabler. Finally, I model inclusive and exclusive positivism on the resulting template, and set out the advantages of the ground-enablers proposal. (shrink)

The characteristic of postmodernism as a cultural paradigm is deconstruction. The fact that “deconstruction” allows a hermeneutical adrift, centrifuge and without poles, shows the difficulty of understanding the ways of thinking, supreme tolerance, which accepts any text. No interpretation of Deconstruction, in Derrida's way as the sense of universality of language, it is not possible, because any interpretation goes in same direction as deconstruction. From the deconstructive-reconstructive hermeneutic methodology we can analyze the existential meaning of historical or social phenomena in (...) terms of understanding the socio-historical reality as a construct that was generated by a "reframed" interpretation. Philosophical issue is "a pretext" of the hermeneutical process of creating the significance. Constructionist epistemology is a structure close to postmodernism perspective in manner of the vision of Lyotard, under which our image of reality is a narrative one, a consensus of speech. The legal discourse is a particular form of speech and can be analyzed in constructionist manner as a textual analysis. The analysis of the legal system must take into account the collective character of interpretive construction. Radically changing the interpretation or the context we modify the interpretation of the representation of reality which consciousness substitute for reality itself. In Foucault's view, Power is internal and constitutive to the discourse. (shrink)

The most influential theory of law in current analytic legal philosophy is legal positivism, which generally understands law to be a kind of institution. The most influential theory of institutions in current analytic social philosophy is that of John Searle. One would hope that the two theories are compatible, and in many ways they certainly are. But one incompatibility that still needs ironing out involves the relation of the social rule that undergirds the validity of any legal system (H.L.A. Hart's (...) rule of recognition) to Searle's notion of codification: the idea that institutions need official declarations of their constitutive rules in order to enjoy the full benefits of institutions. The incompatibility arises from the fact that, in order to do its institutional work, the basic validity rule must be codified in Searle's sense—yet, given the particular role it has in legal positivism, it may be impossible to codify in the Searlean sense. In this paper I develop the incompatibility in detail, consider and reject consigning the basic validity rule to Searle's “Background” capacities that support institutional facts, and conclude that the best route to eliminating it while doing a minimum of damage to the two theories is to make a slight emendation to Searle's theory of institutions. (shrink)

This article argues that the so-called Charge from Psychology does not refute the project of defining art. The charge entails that the project is misguided because it falsely presupposes that the concept of art is classically structured. The charge is challenged by distinguishing philosophers’ normative from psychologists’ descriptive aims. Unlike what many philosophers of art themselves believe, defining art is a normative project, since proposed definitions formulate conditions under which the concept of art should be applied, rather than is applied. (...) Therefore, it is not inherently problematic that definitions do not fit empirical data: a normative definition need not reflect how people categorize items as art. In the end, this article shows the significance of empirical data for definitions of art. (shrink)

Many contemporary practitioners of analytic jurisprudence take their understanding of legal positivism largely from Hart, and the debates about legal positivism exist largely in a post-Hartian world. But if we examine carefully the writings and motivations of Bentham and even Austin, we will discover that there are good historical grounds for treating both a normative version of positivism and a version more focused on legal decision-making as entitled to at least co-equal claims on the positivist tradition. And even if we (...) conceive of the inquiry in philosophical and not historical terms, there are reasons to doubt the view that a theory of the nature of law is the exclusive understanding of the core commitment of legal positivism. Positivism as a descriptive theory of the nature of law is important, but so too is positivism as a normative theory about the preferable attitude of society or theorists, and so too is positivism as a normative or descriptive theory of adjudication and other forms of legal decision-making. Those who understand positivism and the positivist tradition as being more normative or more adjudication-focused than the contemporary understanding allows are thus committing neither historical or philosophical mistakes, and little would be lost were we to recognize the multiple important contemporary manifestations of the legal positivist tradition. (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)

Genomic research is an expanding and subversive field, leaking into various others, from environmental protection to food production to healthcare delivery, and in doing so, it is reshaping our relationship with them. The international community has issued various declaratory instruments aimed at the human genome and genomic research. These soft law instruments stress the special nature of genomics and our genetic heritage, and attempt to set limits on our activities with respect to same, as informed by the human rights paradigm. (...) This paper examines the primary thrust and, more importantly, the joint value position of the Universal Declaration on the Human Genome and Human Rights and the Universal Declaration on Bioethics and Human Rights, concluding that, though important legal instruments from the human rights paradigm, these instruments, or rather the values contained therein, must find a more influential hard law voice and a broader policy environment. (shrink)

An increasing number of Italian scholars are beginning to share the idea that the conceptual basis of legal positivism (LP) is wrong, particularly in the field of Public Law. According to a group of theories called “neoconstitutionalism,” constitutionalism is to be understood not only as a principle based on the need to impose legal limits to political power, but also as an aggregation of values capable of continually remodelling legal relationships, positioning itself as a “pervasive” point of reference for legal (...) experience. A recent essay by Professor Antonio Baldassarre, President Emeritus of the Constitutional Italian Court, about the “misery of legal positivism” is a good expression of this view. In this article, the ideas outlined by Baldassarre are examined and criticized. The paper also tries to defend a version of legal positivism, which has both a conceptual and prescriptive meaning, relating to decisions made on the basis of rules. This view is based on the two correlated concepts of primary formalism and secondary formalism of “competence and procedure.”. (shrink)

This article claims that private law theorists ought to bear in mind the distinction between wholesale questions about the best interpretation or justification of legal institutions, and retail que...