Abstract
The Kelsenian project of a legal science of positive law remains, as demonstrated by the majority of contributions to this volume, a source of continued relevance for contemporary legal theory. In the subsequent development of legal theories of positive law, the Kelsenian project has, however, effectively ceased to be accorded a significant degree of pertinence. The loss of pertinence is marked by the marginalization of the methodological questions and framework of the Kelsenian project and the shift in orientation to other theoretical forms of conceptualization of positive law. The effective jettisoning of the Kelsenian project, predicated upon a transformation in the understanding of the purpose of a theory of positive law, has itself resulted in a significant differentiation and disagreement concerning the foundation for, and parameters of, a legal theory of positive law. This differentiation and disagreement has centred, in contemporary Anglo-American work in particular, upon the question of the degree to which the legal theory of positive law excludes or includes morality (see, for example, Gardner 2001; Kramer 2003; Himma 2001, 2002, 2005; Marmor 2001, 2002, 2007; Raz 1975, 1979, 2011; Shaprio 2009; Waluchow 1994) and upon the wider question of the theoretical or methodological basis for the elaboration of a legal theory of positive law (see, for example, Coleman 2001; Leiter 2007; Shapiro 2013).
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Notes
- 1.
For those chapters that adopt a more critical approach, however, Kelsen arguably remains the theoretical position against which one is required develop a distinct theory of positive law.
- 2.
A recent exception to this is the collection of essays in Duarte d’Almeida et al. (2013).
- 3.
- 4.
For a critical reconsideration of the distinction between an exclusive and an inclusive legal positivism, see Beltrán and Ratti (2013).
- 5.
- 6.
- 7.
It is these articles which represent the detachment from the Kelsenian project, and prepare the basis for the alternative, Razian form of exclusive legal positivism with regard to the separation of law and morality in the essay ‘Authority, Law, and Morality’ (Raz 1994).
- 8.
The Kelsenian reference is to Weber’s Economy and Society. The discussion of Weber in the General Theory of Law and State is more positive than in Kelsen’s earlier Der soziologische und der juristische Staatsbegriff: kritische Untersuchung des Verhältnisses von Staat und Recht (Kelsen 1922).
- 9.
For Pino, it “could also be described as the search for a kind of Rawlsian reflective equilibrium” (Pino 2013, 200).
- 10.
Shapiro’s reference is to Latakos’s The Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes: Philosophical Papers Vol. 1 (Latakos 1980).
- 11.
For Chiassoni, Shaprio’s theory “is, we may even say, a conspiracy between a pretended metaphysical, but actually evaluative, theory of law (the planning theory), on the one hand, and an empiricist, prescriptive model of legal knowledge and legal science, on the other, echoing pre-Benthamite times...[A]n instance of old-fashioned quasi-positivism...” (Chiassoni 2013, 161 (Emphasis in original)).
- 12.
Raz acknowledges that the notion of “chain of validity” is a Razian term (Ibid., 125).
- 13.
Raz acknowledges that critique of the first axiom is the appropriation and further development of the similar Hartian critique (Hart 1983b).
- 14.
- 15.
See also the position of another member of the Vienna School, Adolf Merkl (1919).
- 16.
This is a specific critique of the declarative function accorded to customary law in the work of the early nineteenth century German legal theorist, Savigny, and the early twentieth century work of the French legal theorist, Duguit. For Kelsen, both are “typical variants of the natural-law doctrine with its characteristic dualism of a “true” law behind the positive law” (Ibid., 127).
- 17.
For Raz, in addition to its inadequate conception of “personal morality” and a legal system, it is “deficient in being bound up with other essentially independent as well as wrong doctrines and it is incomplete in not being supported by a semantic doctrine or doctrine of discourse capable of explaining the nature of discourse from the point of view of legal man” (Ibid., 145).
- 18.
- 19.
For Paulson, “It should be noted, however, that the construction does not help at all in understanding what normativity comes to in Kelsen’s legal philosophy. To appeal to the legal man is to map moral beliefs isomorphically onto legal norms. But Kelsen insists that his doctrine of normativity, whatever it comes to in the end, is to be understood altogether independently of morality” (Paulson 2012, 67–68).
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Langford, P., Bryan, I., McGarry, J. (2017). Conclusion: Positive Law and the Kelsenian Project. In: Langford, P., Bryan, I., McGarry, J. (eds) Kelsenian Legal Science and the Nature of Law. Law and Philosophy Library, vol 118. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-51817-6_16
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