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    LoyalLoyalJusticeJustice
    Made withinDC&Austin
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    Perspectives
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    Inverse View

    It is not the case that Natural law theory is not significantly less concerned than contemporary legal positivism with establishing the precise boundaries and content of posited law.

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    Reasons For

    2 perspectives
    Reason for 1 of 2
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    • 1.Legal positivism's separation thesis—that law's existence is a matter of social fact, not moral merit—creates a methodologically distinct enterprise from natural law's moral evaluation of legal validity.
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    • 2.Hart's rule of recognition identifies law through convergent official behavior and pedigree criteria, requiring no moral reasoning about iniquity thresholds that natural law theorists like Finnis treat as central to adjudication.
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    • 3.The positivist concern with legal boundaries is therefore categorically prior to moral assessment, whereas natural law theory collapses this priority ordering, making the two traditions structurally dissimilar rather than merely differently weighted.
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    Reason for 2 of 2
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    • 1.Fuller's procedural natural law and Dworkin's interpretivism both demonstrate that non-positivist frameworks can generate highly determinate legal content without the convergence on positive law sources that the claim presupposes.
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    • 2.If natural law theories derive legal obligation from moral principles that transcend enacted rules, then their apparent concern with posited law is instrumental and subordinate, not coordinate with positivism's foundational commitment to social sources.
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    Reasons Against

    1 perspective
    Reason against
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    • 1.Contemporary legal positivists have abandoned the classical positivist thesis that judges and citizens are morally obligated to comply with positive law.
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    • 2.Contemporary legal positivists endorse the Hartian position that law which is too iniquitous need not be applied or obeyed, making their concern to distinguish posited law from other standards merely provisional.
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    • 3.Natural law theories hold that sound adjudication gives priority to social-fact sources and rules pedigreed by such sources, setting them aside only when they are too iniquitous to apply.
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