Why is legal positivism the dominant view among legal philosophers? The address begins with a somewhat lengthy methodological preamble, offering reasons to resist the extravagant metaphysical inflation of the purported theoretical virtues of positivism in some recent jurisprudential writing by Dickson and ...
"Theonomic" ethics likewise rejects legal positivism and maintains that there is a "law above the (civil) law" to which appeal can be made against the tyranny of rulers and the anarchy of overzealous reformers alike (#9). Since Jesus Christ is Lord over all (cf. #3), civil magistrates...
Similarly, if some humanism is religious, then a humanism that explicitly excluded religion would be something else, a "secular humanism," such as we see in the name of the Council for Secular Humanism. So what would humanism in general, religious and secular, ancient and modern, be about...
(Dworkin:1977,P.199) AlthoughProfessorDworkinisnotlistedamongthosewhomarched withKin窀ordefendedhiminCourt,wewillargueinthispaperthat throughhisteachingsatHnrvard, Oxford,andNYUetc.andhis publicationsandpublicdiscourse,hehasmadealastingcontributiontothe CivilRightsMovement.Forexample,hechallengednotonlyhis...
This was a keynote address at the annual meeting of the Australasian Society of Legal Philosophy at the University of Sydney in 2013. (It is a much expanded vedoi:10.2139/ssrn.2323013Leiter, BrianSocial Science Electronic PublishingBrian Leiter,"Why Legal Positivism"Public Law and Legal Theory,...
Surface conventions constitute the validity of legal norms. The deep convention of law is the social rule that constitutes the very existence of law as a social response to deep needs, something that eventually grounds the authority of law. There is a clear relation between the rule-based ...