What Is Legal Positivism?
Legal positivism is the view that whatever is posited as law is truly law. To help understand this, consider first the Nuremberg Trials, in which Nazi war criminals were prosecuted. The common defense for the Nazis was that they were obeying the law, and laws are supposed to be obeyed. So they obeyed them, and you can't blame them for doing what they were supposed to do. As Martin Luther King Jr. reminds us in his Letter From A Birmingham Jail, what they did was legal. That doesn't seem to be contested. So, if we wish to prosecute Nazis, on what grounds should we do it? Do we want to say that laws do not need to be obeyed? That seems like too much to say. I like it when everyone obeys the law and drives on the right side of the road. It keeps me, and everyone else, safe. So laws do need to be obeyed. Does Nazi law count as real law then? According to legal positivism, yes it does. Legal positivists will disagree on what is the mechanism for positing a law, whether it is the c...