Rodriguez-Navarro and Zambrano on One Myth of the Classical Natural Law Theory: Relfecting on the "Thin" View of Legal Positivism @LawatSurrey

Veronica Rodriguez-Blanco, University of Surrey, Centre for Law and Philosophy, and Pilar Zambrano, University of Navarra, have published One Myth of the Classical Natural Law Theory: Reflecting on the “Thin” View of Legal Positivism at 31 Ratio Juris 9 (2018). Here is the abstract.

Much controversy has emerged on the demarcation between legal positivism and non‐legal positivism with some authors calling for a ban on the ‐as they see it‐ nonsensical labelling of legal philosophical debates. We agree with these critics; simplistic labelling cannot replace the work of sophisticated and sound argumentation. In this paper we do not use the term ‘legal positivism’ as a simplistic label but identify a specific position which we consider to be the most appealing and plausible view on legal positivism. This is the view advocated by Gardner in his paper 'Legal Positivism: 5½ Myths’ (Gardner [Gardner, J., 2001], 199), where he carefully scrutinises the most convincing and unifying postulates of legal positivism, which he calls “the thin view”. The study shows that this thin view presupposes an empirical conception of action that is untenable and implausible since it makes acts of engagement with the law unintelligible to an observer of such acts.

The full text is not available from SSRN.