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Legal positivism is related to empiricist and logical positivist theoretical traditions. Its methods include descriptive investigations of particular legal orders.
Legal positivism is the thesis that the existence and content of law depends on social facts and not on its merits. The English jurist John Austin (1790–1859) formulated it thus: The existence of law is one thing; its merit and demerit another.
Legal positivism is accepted today by most Anglophone philosophers of law, though natural law theories, its natural opponents, continue to challenge positivism’s fundamental claims.
Legal positivism is a philosophy of law that emphasizes the conventional nature of law—that it is socially constructed. According to legal positivism, law is synonymous with positive norms, that is, norms made by the legislator or considered as common law or case law.
The core of legal positivism is the view that the validity of any law can be traced to an objectively verifiable source. Legal positivism rejects the view — held by natural lawyers — that law exists independently from human enactment.
Hart claimed that wherever a legal system exists, there also exists a “rule of recognition” that specifies the criteria of legal validity that any rule must satisfy in order to count as a rule of that legal system.
Kramer explains how H. L. A. Hart reinvigorated legal positivism by disconnecting it from the command theory of law defended by his predecessors Bentham and Austin; by introducing through his own theory of law some new and fruitful concepts into legal thinking, such as the internal point of view, the distinction between primary and secondary ...
Legal positivism does not deny that moral and political criticism of legal systems is important, but insists that a descriptive or conceptual approach to law is valuable, both on its own terms and as a necessary prelude to criticism.
Legal positivism is the view that law is fully defined by its existence as man-made law. Function of positive law is to define the natural law and make it explicit; to make it effective thru sanctions.
Bentham’s utilitarianism, characterised by its naturalistic basis and its claim to govern every aspect of human action, led him to conceive of value judgements as a form of empirical statement; hence the idea of a conceptual separation of fact and value, as required by substantive legal positivism, would have made no sense to him.