Practice question · Select all that apply
Which are true of the separability thesis?
Hints
- Three describe the thesis and its defence; one attributes to it a claim about coercion it never made.
- Positivists agree that law is a coercive order; that is not what the thesis is about.
Show the answer
- A. It holds that the question what law is and the question what law ought to be are distinct
- B. It is compatible with holding that a particular valid law is too unjust to obey
- D. It was defended by Hart in his 1958 exchange with Fuller
Why
The fourth confuses two separate positivist claims. Hart never denied that legal systems coerce, he denied that coercion explains what a rule is, and Kelsen built an entire system on defining the legal norm as one that attaches a sanction to a condition. The separability thesis is about validity and merit, not about force.
Practise Law, Morality, Custom and Force
The app has 5 more questions on this lesson, and keeps your place in the course. Law I is free to start.
More questions on Law, Morality, Custom and Force
- Hart held that a sufficiently unjust rule is, for that reason, not a legal rule at all.
- Arrange these contributions to the debate about law and morality in chronological order.
- Complete the account of the border between law and its neighbours.
- How many requirements does Fuller's internal morality of law contain?
- Legal positivism insists upon separating what the law is from what it ought to be. What practical consequence…
- Arrange these positions from the strongest claim about a connection between law and morality to the weakest.
- The Wolfenden Report recommended in 1957 that private consensual homosexual conduct between adults cease to…
- Austin's command theory cannot account for rules that confer powers, such as those governing how to make a…