Abstract

This article is primarily focused on two interconnected discussions presented by John Gardner in Law as a Leap of Faith. The first one is related to the thesis which, according to Gardner, all positivists agree on; the second one is referred to the positivist’s position regarding the connection between law and morality. In order to address these issues I rely on the distinction between two kinds of criteria: the conceptual criteria and the validity criteria. On this basis, and against what Gardner asserts, I try to defend two main ideas. Firstly, that the thesis on which all positivists agree is not one about the validity criteria that norms must satisfy in order to belong to a legal system, but rather one concerning the conceptual criteria delimiting the concept of law. By the same token, I argue that, according to the positivist understanding of the concept of law, there is no necessary connection between law and morality