Reflective Legal Positivism

Abstract

The argument of theoretical disagreement has been deemed the most serious contemporary challenge to the traditional views of law, not merely for academic legal positivists but for all lawyers and scholars. Although coined by Ronald Dworkin for the specific purpose of opposing conventionalist and positivist theories of law, the argument recognises the general truth that jurisprudence is an inevitably agonistic enterprise. Nowadays, it is one of the most discussed arguments in general jurisprudence. In this paper, I follow Shapiro’s idea that legal positivists have to accept the challenge and accommodate the argument – they simply cannot dismiss it as conceptually irrelevant. I briefly reconstruct the argument and discuss three positivist accounts that accommodate the phenomenon of theoretical disagreement. I also argue that one of the common features of these positivistic responses is a tacit acceptance of a holistic and meta-philosophical perspective that allows theoretical disagreements to fit within the boundaries of the legal‒institutional framework. The holistic turn is no surprise given that Dworkin’s methodology is also in principio holistic. I conclude, however, that holistically pimped legal positivism – being a conscious close neighbour of legal realism – is a more reflective theory of law than the Dworkinian one.