Normative Legal Positivism
PUBLISHER
Cambridge University Press
DATE
2021-01
UVA Law Faculty Affiliations
Abstract
Schauer discusses normative positivism, explaining that this type of positivism comes in two main versions, namely, in the shape of a prescription to legal actors and in the shape of a prescription to legal institutional designers. He argues that a full appreciation of the artefactual nature of law leads to the conclusion that a culture can modify its concept of law in order to make it as useful a concept as possible, and that if normative positivism is a plausible position, it follows not only that choosing a concept of law on moral grounds is a moral position but also that choosing to see the enterprise of legal theory in a normative way itself amounts to a normative position.
Citation
Frederick Schauer, Normative Legal Positivism, in Patricia Mindus & Torben Spaak The Cambridge Companion to Legal Positivism, Cambridge University Press, 61–78 (2021).
More in This Category
