One aspect of Aquinas’s theory has attracted particular attention and controversy. He states that a ‘law’ that fails to conform to natural or divine law is not a law at all. This is usually expressed as lex iniusta non est lex (an unjust law is not law).

Put simply, legal positivism, like scientific positivism, rejects the view – held by natural lawyers – that law exists independently from human enactment.

The likelihood of a sanction is always uncertain, but Austin is driven to the rather unsatisfactory position that a sanction consists of ‘the smallest chance of incurring the smallest evil’.

A legal system is founded on state coercion; behind its norms is the threat of force. This distinguishes the tax collector from the robber. Both demand your money.

Fuller recounts the ‘moral’ tale of a fictional King Rex and the eight ways in which he fails to make law. He goes wrong because (1) he fails to achieve rules at all, so that every issue must be decided on an ad hoc basis; (2) he does not publicize the rules that his subjects are expected to observe; (3) he abuses his legislative powers by enacting

Liberal feminism accentuates equality, while radical feminism is concerned with difference.

Jeremy Bentham who described natural law as, amongst other things, ‘a mere work of the fancy’

how a single law creates a single offence defined by its being the narrowest species of that kind of offence recognized by the law.

Law, in Hart’s analysis, is a system of rules. His argument is as follows. All societies have social rules. These include rules relating to morals, games, etc., as well as obligation rules that impose duties or obligations. The latter may be divided into moral rules and legal rules (or law). As a result of our human limitations, mentioned above,