Abstract

If there is one doctrine distinctively associated with legal positivism, it is the separability of law and morality. Both in opposition to classical natural-law thinkers and in response to more recent theorists such as Ronald Dworkin and Lon Fuller, positivists have endeavored to impugn any number of ostensibly necessary connections between the legal domain and the moral domain. Such is the prevailing view of legal positivism among people familiar with jurisprudence. During the past couple of decades, however, that prevailing view has come into question among some estimable legal positivists. In particular, Joseph Raz and his followers have queried the importance and the very tenability of an insistence on the separability of law and morality. The present article maintains that the traditional view of legal positivism is correct and that the recent skepticism about it on the part of some positivists is unfounded. When the notion of the disjoinability of law and morality is understood properly as a large array of theses, it proves to be resistant to the challenges that have been mounted against it