analytical
legal positivism, has lost a sense of itself after Dworkin's challenge to Hartian jurisprudence and became absorbed by the family dispute between hard (or exclusive) and soft (or inclusive) conceptions of
legal positivism.
While
legal positivism and natural law approaches might each be compatible with observations about social and historical context, (43) they do not direct our attention to them.
versions of
legal positivism are those espoused by Hart, Joseph Raz, and
of
legal positivism) associated with arbitrariness, legal nihilism was
This purely social practice foundation of legality is what fundamentally differentiates
legal positivism from the universal aspirations of natural law morality.
with natural law and
legal positivism, in that order, followed by legal
Legal philosophy today is dominated by two schools of thought:
legal positivism and natural law thinking.
Three twentieth-century developments in American law and jurisprudence--the emergence of
legal positivism as the dominant legal theory, the ascendency of public law over private law, and the predominance of federal law over state law--have had a profound impact on state constitutional interpretation and have made the interpretation of this state constitutional provision a more challenging undertaking.
Unlike conventional international
legal positivism, inclusive positivism acknowledges that moral obligation plays a role in the validation of human rights law consistent with the practice of human rights actors.