Over the years legal positivism has been subject to a number of grotesque misconceptions, including claims that it is authoritarian, statist, and quietistic. Invariably the authors of these criticisms fail to show that accepting the truth of ST requires one to endorse authoritarian, statist, or quietistic commitments.
2.
H.L.A. Hart, The Concept of Law, 2nd. ed. (Oxford, UK: Clarendon, 1994), 185-86.
3.
J. Austin, The Provence of Jurisprudence Determined (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 157.
4.
The three variants represented by the books under review do not exhaust the realm of actual or possible positions regarding ST. There is notably `exclusive legal positivism' (it is necessarily true that there is no connection between law and morality), and since Godwin there have been anarchist positions (law is essentially immoral).
5.
M.H. Kramer, In Defense of Legal Positivism: Law without Trimmings ( Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1999).
6.
H.L.A. Hart , "Positivism and the Separation of Law and Morals ," Harvard Law Review71, no. 4(1958): 593-629, 596.
7.
Ibid.
8.
B. Tamanaha , "The Contemporary Relevance of Legal Positivism ," Australian Journal of Legal Philosophy32 (2007): 1-39.
9.
Hart, "Positivism and the Separation of Law and Morals," 594.
