2 - Legal Positivism, Censorial Jurisprudence, and Legal Reform
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
Summary
The heart of legal positivism, according to Jeremy Bentham and his then-contemporary band of “radicals,” as well as modern positivist legal theorists, was what is now confusedly called the “separability thesis”: the law that is, is not necessarily the same as the law that ought to be. That a law exists, positivists insisted, then as now, does not imply anything one way or the other about its merits or demerits, about whether it is just, or about whether it is a good law: laws are not necessarily good simply by virtue of the fact of their existence; some laws are unjust or unwise but nevertheless law.
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- Normative JurisprudenceAn Introduction, pp. 60 - 106Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2011
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