COMM 2273 Lecture Notes - Lecture 44: Benjamin N. Cardozo School Of Law, Strake Jesuit College Preparatory, Forum Research
10 Feb 2020
Department
Course
Professor
Document Summary
At legal positivism: laws need an external standard to create moral permissions. There are reasons behind laws that are subject to tests of morality, so if those reasons are flawed and generate a law then the law is also flawed. Therefore in order to justify the legality of something the justifications for that law must be justified using some external standard: laws are different everywhere and can be interpreted in different ways by different courts. The resolution is a generic but static statement, and there"s no way to generate a static permission out of a state of affairs that is constantly changing from place. Therefore legality is insufficient to affirm: law and morality are inherently distinct. It is sometimes thought that wolff"s challenge to authority is merely a special case of a more general paradox, one that purports to show the incompatibility of authority and rationality.
