The Underlying Value of MacCormick’s Post-Positivism

Save for one key difference, Neil MacCormick’s institutional theory of a legal system closely parallels Hart’s positivist theory. Though MacCormick’s theory of a legal system looks very much like Hart’s positivist theory, he concludes that a central positivist tenet is false. He argues that, contra positivism, moral considerations are necessarily determinants of a legal system’s laws; for, on his account, radically unjust norms necessarily are …