Philosophy of Law
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, 2
Comparison and contrast of Hart's Legal Positivism and Law as Integrity
Legal positivism is a guiding philosophical theory of the nature of law that holds that the
existence and content of law are entirely dependent on social facts, such as facts about human
behavior and intentions, and that there is no real correlation between legality and morality
precisely, the emergence and content of a law do not depend on its facts or detriments. Since its
inception, the idea has attracted a huge number of supporters and has undergone significant
adaptation and development. Most Anglophone philosophers of law embrace legal positivist
today, however natural law theories, positivism's natural opponents, continue to contest its core
assertions. Hart's theory of legal positivism, the concept that laws are rules produced by people
and that there is no inherent or essential link between law and morality, is presented within the
context of analytic philosophy in The Concept of Law. According to Hart, law is dependent not
only on the exterior social constraints that are applied to fellow humans, but also on the
underlying attitude that such people have toward laws regarded as imposing responsibilities.
Natural law is an ethical and philosophical system that holds that humans have innate values that
regulate their reasoning and actions. According to natural law, these standards of good and evil
are inherent in humans and are not imposed by society or judges and lawyers. The discussion
about the similarities and differences on the Hart’s Legal Positivism and Law as Integrity are
discussed in the clauses below.
The two ideas are mutually exclusive: it is completely compatible to embrace one while
rejecting the other. According to legal positivism, it is untrue. Legal positivism and the natural
law theory of positive law are opposing viewpoints on what law is and how it relates to
justice/morality. According to Hart, there is no logically required relationship between the law
and compulsion, or between the morality and ethics. He believes that categorizing all laws as