Toh presents an overview of the relation between legal positivism and meta-ethical theories, arguing that philosophers of law, debating the nature of law, can gain insights from a study of meta-ethics, and that one such insight, a methodological insight, is that legal philosophers can and should follow moral philosophers and give up (what he refers to as) the double-duty presumption, that is, the presumption that theories of (the nature of) law must also give answers to the usual type of questions concerning the interpretation and application of the law.

Leiter considers the relation between legal positivism and legal realism. He argues that H. L. A. Hart’s theory of law is really a species of legal realism, and that there are four ways in which this is so, namely, that the law operates primarily outside the courts; that the law is sometimes rationally indeterminate; that the law is explicable in wholly naturalistic terms; and that the law is not necessarily morally good. He also argues that Hart’s critique of American legal realism is misguided, because Hart would fail to distinguish clearly between conceptual legal realism, which is a theory about the nature of law according to which there are no legal rules and law consists in court decisions and predictions about them, and empirical legal realism, which is a claim about how it is useful for attorneys to think about law when they advise their clients and which says that it is a mistake to think that judges (and others) are bound by legal rules. As Leiter sees it, while conceptual rule-skepticism is indeed mistaken, the Americans do not embrace it, and while they do embrace empirical rule-skepticism, this type of rule-skepticism is justified.

Born to a master tailor and his wife in the provincial town of Dessau, Johann Ludwig Wilhelm Müller (1794–1827) was the sole one of their seven children to survive infancy. The family occasionally received small financial assistance from Leopold Franz III, the Prince of Anhalt-Dessau, elevated in 1807 to its Duke. The Anglophile peace-loving regent created one of the most progressive and prosperous of the smaller German states. He cultivated educational and social reforms, supported architectural and landscape design and scientific inquiry, and encouraged religious tolerance in a state that was home to congregants of several Christian denominations and a growing Jewish community. The first German-language Jewish newspaper was founded in Dessau in 1806. Müller attended the local Gymnasium, excelling in the study of languages. Following a period of university studies, military service, and scholarly Wanderjahre, he eventually settled down as a teacher in the city of his birth.

Brian considers the normativity of law within the framework of legal positivism, noting that the very idea of it has been understood differently by different authors. He proposes that we analyse the concept in terms of reasons for action, that such reasons must be something more than prudential reasons, that the proper question is whether law gives us reasons for actions of the relevant type that we would not have without law, and that Hume’s law makes this task difficult for legal positivists. He considers consequentialist justifications for the normativity of law proposed by Hobbes and Hume, Kelsen’s theory of the basic norm, Postema’s claim that the rule of recognition is a coordination convention, Shapiro’s planning theory of law, and Enoch’s triggering account, concluding that these accounts are all problematic in different ways. He observes that some authors see it as a specifically legal normativity that is neither moral nor prudential, while others conceive of it as moral normativity; he concludes that the former alternative needs elaboration and justification, while the latter is difficult to establish from within the legal positivist tradition.

This essay explores the distinction between “continuity” and “discontinuity” in the poetry and music of Winterreise. In a continuous poetic cycle, the poems progress in a logical, recognizable process where we know where we begin and end, and everything in between relates to the whole. Musical continuity likewise involves a clear sense of motion forward and reaching a goal – such as beginning and ending in the same key, or tonal coherence. In a discontinuous poetic or musical cycle, on the other hand, there is no clear motion forward from beginning to end, no clear end point, and a lack of cohesion or interconnectedness (recurring elements) over the whole. But the distinction is not altogether clear. Within a continuous cycle, interruptions do occur, and within a discontinuous cycle, elements of continuity occur as well. Ultimately, a cycle is experienced primarily one way or the other based on a number of factors, including the presence of repeated elements (continuous) or lack of repeated elements (discontinuous).

Chiassoni explains that in the early 1960s Norberto Bobbio put forward a descriptive theory of legal positivism consisting of two main parts, namely, a definition of legal positivism, according to which there is no law but positive law (the exclusivity thesis) and an analysis of legal positivism that identifies three versions of legal positivism: legal positivism as an approach to the study of law (scientific positivism), legal positivism as a theory of positive law (theoretical positivism) and legal positivism as a doctrine of obedience to positive law qua law (ideological positivism). He explains that legal positivism as an approach to the study of law involves a commitment to a value-neutral study of positive law; that legal positivism as a theory of positive law encompasses (what he refers to as) narrow theoretical positivism as well as broad theoretical positivism; and that we may distinguish between three versions of legal positivism as a doctrine of obedience to positive law qua law, namely, an unconditional version, a moderate, conditional, relative version, and a very moderate, conditional, relative version, and that these versions differ in important ways.

Marmor considers the separation thesis, which he understands as saying that whether a given norm is legally valid depends on its sources, not its merits; and this means that he is concerned with the separation thesis conceived as a thesis about legal status, not as a thesis about the content of legal statements. Observing that the distinction between sources and merits is very close to the distinction between is and ought, he considers the objection that the separation thesis cannot be upheld because one cannot clearly distinguish between sources and merits, between is and ought. He responds to this objection, however, that the separation thesis can be upheld if it is seen as an answer to the question ‘What counts as law?’ rather than to the question ‘What is law?’, and that this response is in keeping with a common wish on the part of legal positivists to provide a reductive explanation of legal validity, that is, an explanation of legal validity exclusively in terms of social facts.

Gizbert-Studnicki considers how we are to understand the social thesis and whether the social thesis, properly understood, can handle Hume’s guillotine, that is, the problem also known as the fact-value gap or the is-ought problem that Hume first articulated in book III, part I, section I of his A Treatise of Human Nature (1739), according to which one may not logically derive an ‘ought’ from an ‘is’. Having distinguished three interpretations of the social thesis – the social sources thesis, the sources thesis and the social fact thesis – he focuses on the social fact thesis, which is a metaphysical thesis according to which legal facts are ultimately determined by social facts alone. Gizbert-Studnicki then considers three different ways of understanding the relation between social facts and legal facts along the lines of the social fact thesis, namely, reduction, supervenience and grounding. He maintains that while all three relations are more or less problematic, the grounding relation is to be preferred, and that adopting the idea of grounding helps us avoid Hume’s guillotine, since grounding is not a matter of entailment but a metaphysical relation that holds between facts.

On August 19, 1815, a dozen years before undertaking Winterreise, Franz Schubert composed a song that treads similar poetic ground. Like the winter wanderer of Wilhelm Müller’s cycle, the protagonist of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s “An den Mond” (D259; To the Moon) roams through a natural landscape evoking inner terrain; the moonlit wood and valley conjure the recesses of his (or her) mind, intimating a journey of self-discovery. The protagonist’s present solitude, recollection of joyful and troubled times, glancing reference to faithless love, direct address to a river, allusion to the harshness of winter, mention of his own song, and mysterious closing reference to wandering by night through the labyrinth of the heart all anticipate ways that Müller, in a darker mode, conveys existential isolation and suffering in Winterreise.

As Redondo explains, Eugenio Bulygin’s legal positivism embraces the separation thesis, a version of the social thesis (which he calls the ‘social sources thesis’), and an indeterminacy thesis, according to which law is sometimes indeterminate, giving judges discretion to decide cases. Bulygin holds that law can be necessarily normative only in a weak, relative sense. Redondo explains that Bulygin espouses two methodological theses that are positivist – that the task of legal philosophers is to explicate legal concepts and that we need to maintain in our legal thinking a distinction between norms and normative propositions – and that he espouses three substantive theses that are also positivist – that legal positivists must adopt a concept of relative normative validity to account for the existence of legal rights and duties, that legal interpretation must proceed on the assumption of linguistic conventionalism and that there is a fundamental and unbridgeable distinction between prescriptive and power-conferring norms. These theses can be said to be positivist because they all, one way or another, enable a value-neutral study of law, i.e. so-called methodological legal positivism.

Green considers a strong version of the semantic thesis, according to which legal statements are descriptive statements solely about social facts. He starts from the foundational thesis of positivism, the social thesis, which has it that the existence and content of the law are ultimately based solely in social facts about a community. But he notes that there are two versions of this thesis. Under the reduction version, a legal system and its laws consist of social facts. Under the assignment version, they are not social entities at all; they are norms, understood as abstract objects. But the grounds for assigning these abstract objects to a community are ultimately solely social facts. Focusing on the assignment version, he asks whether the semantic thesis follows from the social thesis, and, if that answer is no, the extent to which legal statements actually conform to the semantic thesis. He argues that assignment positivists can conclude that the answer is negative because, for them, legal statements describe abstract objects. For Green, this simple account of the semantics of legal statements is superior to expressivist accounts and to Raz’s account.

Rodriguez-Blanco clarifies John Finnis’s objection to legal positivism in the shape of Hart’s theory, namely, that it is unstable because it uses the notion of an internal point of view, which does not have sufficient discriminatory power to distinguish between good and less good legal norms, between rational and non-rational court decisions, etc. Finnis’s view is that understanding a human action in law involves understanding what the point of the action is, that such understanding requires use of the Aristotelian focal meaning (or central case) methodology, that Hart’s internal point of view does not involve focal meaning and therefore cannot be used to understand the point of human actions, and that Hart’s theory is thus unstable. Rodriguez-Blanco argues that Anglophone legal philosophers’ focus in the past fifty years on Dworkin’s critique of Hart’s legal positivism has meant that they missed an opportunity to learn, through Finnis’s critique of Hart’s theory, about the philosophy of practical reason and the theory of action, and to contribute significantly to debates about normative questions, the nature of law and its relation to agency, reasons for action, and goodness.