Legal Positivism

The book brings together 33 state-of-the-art chapters on the import and the pros and cons of legal positivism.

This collection of essays from legal philosophers offers an assessment of the nature and viability of legal positivism. It addresses questions such as: to what extent is the law adequately described as autonomous?; and should legal theorists maintain a conceptual separation of law and morality?.

17 Stanley L. Paulson (1992), 'The Neo-Kantian Dimension of Kelsen's Pure Theory of Law', Oxford Journal of Legal Studies, 12, pp. 311-32. -- 18 Anthony J. Sebok (1995), 'Misunderstanding Positivism', Michigan Law Review, 93, pp. 2054-132. -- Name Index

A theme of growing importance in both the law and philosophy and socio-legal literature is how regulatory dynamics can be identified (that is, conceptualised and operationalised) and normative expectations met in an age when transnational actors operate on a global plane and in increasingly fragmented and transformative contexts. A reconsideration of established theories and axiomatic findings on regulatory phenomena is an essential part of this discourse. There is indeed an urgent need for discontinuity regarding what we (think we) know about, among other things, law, legality, sovereignty and political legitimacy, power relations, institutional design and development, and pluralist dynamics of ordering under processes of globalisation and transnationalism. Making an important contribution to the scholarly debate on the subject, this volume features original and much-needed essays of theoretical and applied legal philosophy as well as socio-legal accounts that reflect on whether legal positivism has anything to offer to this intellectual enterprise. This is done by discussing whether global and transnational cultural, socio-political, economic, and juridical challenges as well as processes of diversification, fragmentation, and transformation (significantly, de-formalisation) reinforce or weaken legal positivists’ assumptions, claims, and methods. The themes covered include, but are not limited to, absolute and limited state sovereignty; the ‘new international legal positivism’; Hartian legal positivism and the ‘normative positivist’ account; the relationship between modern secularisation, social conventionalism, and meta-ontological issues of temporality in postnational jurisprudence; the social positivisation of human rights; the formation and content of jus cogens norms; feminist critique; the global and transnational migration of principles of justice and morality; the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties rule of interpretation; and the responsibility of transnational corporations.

This book develops a general theory of law, inclusive legal positivism, which seeks to remain within the tradition represented by authors such as Austin, Hart, MacCormick, and Raz, while sharing some of the virtues of both classical and modern theories of natural law, as represented by authors such as Aquinas, Fuller, Finnis, and Dworkin. Its central theoretical questions are: Does the existence or content of positive law ever depend on moral considerations? If so, is this fact consistent with legal positivism? The author shows how inclusive positivism allows one to answer yes to both of these questions. In addition to articulating and defending his own version of legal positivism, which is a refinement and development of the views of H.L.A. Hart as expressed in his classic book The Concept of Law, the author clarifies the terms of current jurisprudential debates about the nature of law. These debates are often clouded by failures to appreciate that different theorists are offering differing kinds of theories and attempting to answer different questions. There is also a failure, principally on the part of Ronald Dworkin, to characterize opposing theories correctly. The clarity of Waluchow's work will help to remove the confusion which has hitherto marred some jurisprudential debate, particularly about Dworkin's work.

This work represents a serious and philosophically sophisticated guide to modern American legal theory, demonstrating that legal positivism has been a misunderstood and underappreciated perspective through most of twentieth-century American legal thought.

This profound and scholarly treatise develops a critical version of legal positivism as the basis for modern legal scholarship. Departing from the formalism of Hart and Kelsen and blending the European tradition of Weber, Habermas and Foucault with the Anglo-American contributions of Dworkin and MacCormick, Tuori presents the normative and practical faces of law as a multilayered phenomenon within which there is an important role for critical legal dogmatics in furthering law's self-understanding and coherence. Its themes also resonate with importance for the development of the European legal system.

This collection of Tom Campbell's essays reaches back to his pioneering work on socialist rights in the 1980s and forward from his seminal book, The Legal Theory of Ethical Positivism (1996).