ABSTRACT
Every historical type of law has to cope with the problem of how to determine the limits to the powers of human law-making, application and enforcement, or, to put in another way, to answer the question as to what extent the law can justify coercion. In western legal tradition, this question has, up until modem times, usually been answered in terms of natural law. In our era of modem law, the problem of the law's limits is ever more pertinent but the traditional solution is no longer feasible. Under the dominance of positive law, legal relevance is conceded only to those normative yardsticks which themselves meet the criterion of positivity. Hence, we should be able to define the law's limits within positive law. The impotence ofKelsen's and Hart's positivism before this task has given the impetus to my effort to elaborate an alternative, critical legal positivism.
