Is legal positivism a “one-way projection of authority”?
Preface: It may be helpful to read legal positivism prior to this essay. All page numbers are references to the anthology Law and Morality, edited by David Dyzenhaus and Arthur Ripstein, and published by Univeristy of Toronto Press. In 1969, Lon L. Fuller published The Morality of Law. In it, he attempted to provide a counterargument to H.L.A. Hart’s assertion, presented in Positivism and the Separation of Law and Morals and The Concept of Law, that there is no morality inherent to law (48). Fuller felt that the principles that are endemic to law, taken together, supercede the considerations of mere efficacy, and that their inclusion in the nature of law therefore points to a minimum standard of morality that is inherent in the law (90). He argued that the minimum standard of morality expresses itself in the form of reciprocity between government and governed (103). Therefore, Fuller set out to show that Hart misunderstood law as being a one-way projection of authority, in order to pro
