Card 6.2 · Root VI — The Philosophy of X Family
Philosophy of Law
Is an unjust law still a law?
Philosophy of law asks what law is, what makes it binding, and how it relates to morality.
On this card
Where it sits
Under VI. Philosophy of X. Borders 3.2.2 Duty-based approaches, 6.4 Political philosophy, 4.3.1 Deontic logic.
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The rival answers
| Position | Claim |
|---|---|
| Natural law | An unjust law is defective as law; law is subject to moral standards |
| Legal positivism | Law is a social fact; its validity and its merit are separate questions |
| Legal realism | Law is what officials actually do, not what the texts say |
| Interpretivism | Law includes the principles that best justify its practice |
| Critical legal studies | Legal reasoning is politics conducted in a specialised vocabulary |
| Usul al-fiqh | Law derived from revealed sources by disciplined interpretive method |
Where do you stand?
Is an unjust law still a law?
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Key figures
| Figure | Dates | Tradition | Contribution |
|---|---|---|---|
| Thomas Aquinas | 1225–1274 | Scholastic | Natural law; an unjust law is a corruption of law |
| Al-Shafi'i | 767–820 | Islamic | Systematised legal methodology |
| Jeremy Bentham | 1748–1832 | European modern | Law as command; separation of law and morals |
| H. L. A. Hart | 1907–1992 | Analytic | The rule of recognition; sophisticated positivism |
| Lon Fuller | 1902–1978 | Analytic | The inner morality of law |
| Ronald Dworkin | 1931–2013 | Analytic | Law as integrity; principles alongside rules |
Talk about it here
Conversations about this question in Law:
- An unjust law is not really law: legal positivism is mistaken 6 replies
- Judges make law in hard cases, and pretending they discover it does more harm than good 6 replies
- Han Feizi’s case for clear law, read in Lahore 5 replies
- Where is Hart’s rule of recognition actually written down? 5 replies
- If nobody deserves punishment, could a court actually run on Pereboom’s quarantine model? 5 replies
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Connections
→ 6.4, 3.2.2 · ↔ 3.2.6, 6.4.1, 4.3.1, 5.2.3 · ◇ natural law, legal positivism, legal realism, interpretivism · ○ Islamic golden age; Scholastic; Modern; Table 7
→ depends on · ↔ borders: genuine overlap, neither prior · ◇ answered by: points from question to answers · ○ appears in: points to the timeline and the comparisons
The full card is in the book
In The Coordinates of Thought this card goes on to a worked example that sets the answers against one case, and to where the question touches daily life — page 250.