Legal Positivism

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to examine some of the most important aspects that characterize legal positivism in the civil law tradition. First, it examines the seminal insights developed independently by Norberto Bobbio and Alf Ross into the ambiguity of the term “legal positivism”, which prior to their contributions was used loosely to refer to legalistic ideology, formalistic legal theory, and empirical legal methodology. Second, it explores the connections between ethical non-cognitivism and positivism itself, which positivist theorists in the civil law tradition have found difficult to avoid. Next, three of the most important results of civil law legal positivism are examined: the analysis of the systematic properties of norms (such as validity, applicability, efficacy, and defeasibility), the theory of normative systems theory, and the theory of legal interpretation.