Thread by @Hassan_A_Niazi

Every law student should have a basic understanding of Joseph Raz's contribution to legal theory.

On his death, here's a very simplified version of what his views were on exclusive legal positivism for the young law student.

For everyone else, I apologise.

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At its core, legal positivism is a theory that says law's validity - or what ultimately determines if something can be called 'law' - is based on 'social facts' as opposed to things like morality etc.

So, for example, philosophers like Austin believed law was valid if it was made by whoever was the most powerful (the sovereign) - a social fact.

Over time as this view was criticised the predominant theory of positivism started to open up to the idea that while law may primarily be based on social facts, ultimately issues of morality could not be excluded entirely.

This became 'inclusive' (or soft) positivism (See Hart)

Raz came along and broke this trend.

Law 'only' depended on social facts for its validity and authority over people.

Raz perfected what is known as 'exclusive' legal positivism in this regard. How did he do this?

First, Raz argued that laws have legitimate authority over people because they perform a vital service: helping us decide a course of action to pursue in any given situation.

The best way to understand this is through an example.

What if there was no law telling us which side of the road to drive on? In this situation all of us would have widely different answers based on our personal ideas of what is the right thing to do. Ultimately, with no final authority, we would have chaos.

Law resolves these problems by determining the best way to proceed in any scenario. We accept its decision because we acknowledge that the state has greater resources and can consolidate greater expertise on these subjects to help us get to where we want.

The assumption, of course, is that law allows us to make better decisions if we follow it rather than if we just used our own judgement.

The resolution of such coordination problems give law its authority.

This authority is independent of your moral views. If you accepted law's authority to make decisions, then you cannot say that you don't want to follow the law because it is immoral.

This explains why we follow laws and court decisions that we may find morally wrong.

Raz uses the following example to explain how this works:

Suppose an orthodox Jew asks his Catholic friend whether he should eat bacon according to Jewish law? His friend could answer by telling him that he saw no moral problem with it, but that would not answer the question.

He would respond by saying that Jewish law prohibited the eating of bacon and if he accepted the authority of that law, then he should not eat bacon. This view was independent of the Catholic's moral view of the matter.

In sum: law is about setting standards for behaviour in such a way that they cannot be disregarded by invoking moral grounds.

There are many criticisms of Raz's view, but his theory remains perhaps the most compelling of the positivists. Also, there is a lot more to the theory that cannot be covered in Tweets, but hopefully this gives a glimpse of how he resurrected exclusive positivism.

If you are a student of law, I hope you find joy in studying legal philosophy and may you have good teachers.