Legal positivism

Legal positivism holds that a rule’s legal validity depends on social sources, such as enactment or recognition, rather than necessarily on its moral merit.

Social fact: A fact about human practices, institutions, or conventions. Positivists ground legal validity in social facts about how officials make and recognize rules.
Rule of recognition: A social rule used by officials to identify the valid legal standards in a system. Hart’s account makes this shared official practice the ultimate test of legal validity.
John Austin: An English legal philosopher who described law as the sovereign’s command backed by sanctions. His command theory became a foundational, though limited, form of legal positivism.
Inclusive legal positivism: A positivist view allowing a legal system’s social criteria to incorporate moral standards. It permits moral tests when a system’s accepted sources make them legally relevant.
Unjust law: A law whose requirements or effects are morally wrong. Positivism allows a rule to count as law even when it is gravely unjust.
Legal validity: The status of a rule as belonging to a legal system. The theory explains validity through a rule’s sources, not necessarily its justice.
Command theory of law: John Austin’s account of law as sovereign commands backed by sanctions. It offers an early positivist explanation of law through identifiable social authority.
H. L. A. Hart: An English philosopher whose work recast legal positivism around rules and social practices. His account of the rule of recognition reshaped modern positivist jurisprudence.
Exclusive legal positivism: A positivist view holding that legal content must be identifiable without moral reasoning. It draws a stricter boundary between legal sources and moral judgment than inclusive positivism.
Legal interpretation: The process of determining the meaning and application of legal texts and rules. Positivists disagree about when interpretation relies on sources and when discretion begins.

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