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.

Hohfeld argued that Maitland was wrong to consider that equity did not conflict with the common law. To Hohfeld, conflict between legal and equitable rules existed if the application of one would produce a result different from the application of the other. But Hohfeld’s own analysis shows this approach to conflict to be inadequate. On Hohfeld’s analysis, Maitland proves to be correct: when the forms of legal entitlements must be brought into account, it can be seen that the rules of law and equity in most cases indeed do not conflict. And those rules correspond to distinct purposes in law. This is demonstrated through analysis of the express trust and extended then to another area in which legal and equitable rules have been said to conflict – in the law of assignment.