Legal Positivism: Inclusive

Introduction

Jurisprudence is the philosophical study of law asking questions like: What constitutes a legally valid rule? Or, what constitutes a legal system? Or, what makes a good legal rule?

In the pursuit to explain the nature of law, to identify the existence conditions of law, general jurisprudence has at its disposal two mother theories: legal positivism and natural law theory. Natural law claims that we can make sense of legal rules as reasons for action, i.e., reasons for doing what the rule demands, ifsuch rules are derived from reason and concurrent with principles of justice and rule of law. As such, morality is an existence condition of law. Legal positivism holds that the existence of law is a matter of social fact. This entry will unpack what that means and the claims specific to Inclusive Legal Positivism [ILP], a conception of law that grounds itself in positivist claims about the nature of law while accounting for the core intuition of natural law theory that...