Importance Of Legal Positivism

Introduction:

What is law? Is it written? Where does it come from? Law is a phenomenon of large societies with sovereign: a determinate person or group of people who have supreme and absolute de facto – power, and they are obeyed by all or most others but do not obey anyone else.

Legal Positivism:

With a long history and broad influence, legal positivism, is discussed in mediaeval legal and political thought. Its roots lie in the conventionalist political philosophies of Hobbes, however, Jeremy Bentham, wrote its first full elaboration, that Austin adopted, modified and popularized (L. Green, 2003, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Legal Positivism). It is sometimes associated with the homonymic but independent doctrines of logical or sociological positivism.

Modern legal positivism is the assertion that the nature and subject of law, rests on social facts and not on its virtue. As English jurist, John Austin (1790 – 1859), puts it: “the existence of law is one thing; its merit and demerit [are] another.” In simple terms, legal positivists believe that, the existence and content of law does not rely

Marx, Weber, Durkheim, among many others including the most contemporary feminist scholars, all acknowledge that the law essentially relies on social fact. Therefore, stating that the existence of law depends on facts alone and not on its merits is a relation thesis and not otherwise a thesis about the individual relata. Hence, most traditional ‘natural law’ include beliefs in an objective morality, as they do not contradict legal positivism (L. Green, 2003, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Legal Positivism). Moral theories: the view that moral norms are valid only if they have a source in social conventions. Such theists and relativists apply to morality the constraints that legal positivists think hold for law (L. Green, 2003, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Legal