ABSTRACT
Unlike natural law theories, legal sociology, or history of law, legal positivism focuses upon the legal order, its constituent norms and the hierarchy of those norms. In Hans Kelsen's formulation of legal positivism,* this hierarchy is abstracted from specific legal content. Ethical, political, and ideological motives are irrelevant to the evaluation of legal orders.2 There are, however, many scholars of Jewish law who are passionately committed to the relevance, efficacy, and religious worth of their subject and, as consequence, adopt a positivist posture in their apologia of Halakhah.J For these scholars, changing moral climates, historical relativism, and textual criticism are "modernist" ideological concerns that are equally out of place in legal positivism as they are in theological Orthodoxy.
