ABSTRACT
INTRODUCTION Legal positivism is the name given to a great school of juristic thought, which includes such luminaries of philosophy as Hobbes (1588-1679), Bentham (1748-1832), Austin (1790-1859) and Professor HLA Hart (1907-1992). The main feature of legal positivism is its insistence that the law of a society be identified purely by ‘social facts’ and that one does not need a moral argument to work out the content of the law – what the modern legal positivist, Professor Raz, calls ‘the sources thesis’. The legal positivist does not deny that law is very often influenced by morality, or even that there are necessary connections between law and morality but legal positivism argues that it is better to analyse the social practice we call ‘law’ without importing into our analysis any view of what the ultimate moral function of law is: in other words we should analyse law without ‘rose-tinted spectacles’ such as how ‘necessary’ law is for society, for such a ‘rose-tinted’ view could distort the actual reality or ‘essence’ of law.
