Download of the Week
The Download of the Week is Legal Positivism Since H.L.A. Hart by Jules Coleman, . Here is a taste:
- Dworkin is inclined to trivialize what it is about law that is of interest to positivists. He often associates positivism with a social science project that we are ill suited for. The only philosophical projects he allows that we might be interested are not interesting: either an account of the meaning of ‘law,’ or the individuation of norms. Now frankly I am interested in the first of these projects, but not for the reasons Dworkin thinks, and every positivist is interested in the latter project but not as a vapid or empty exercise. Rather, it is an interesting feature of our social lives that we participate at any one time in a wide range of normative social practices. They are similar to one another in certain ways, and different from one another in other ways. Our participation is different, our reasons for doing so differ; the claims these practices make on us our different. We want to explore the distinguishing features of the practices because we want to know how they differ from one another and how they are similar to one another, and we want to know how and why the claims they make on us differ. In other words we want to understand important aspects of ourselves in the social world. At the end of the day, jurisprudence is important to the human project of self-understanding. I don’t think that is any less worthy or suspect that understanding the law from the point of view of central concerns in political philosophy. I doubt that one has to be a positivist either to appreciate the importance of jurisprudence to understanding ourselves from the first person perspective in the social world.
