User:CheshireKatz/Notes/Positivism

Positivism
John Austin's Legal Positivism

H.L.A. Hart's Rule of Recognition and Practice Theory of Social Rules

Malum in se vs. Malum prohibitum

In Convention: A Philosophical Study, David Kellogg Lewis's described conventions (as explained by Andrei Marmor):

"Standard instances of conventions are not agreements, rather they are practical (pragmatic) solutions to recurrent coordination problems."

A typical coordination problem arises, according to Lewis, when:

"Several agents have a particular structure of preferences with respect to their mutual modes of conduct, namely that between several alternatives of conduct open to them in a given set of circumstances, each and every agent has a stronger preference to act as the other agents will, than his own preference for acting upon any one of the particular alternatives.

Most coordination problems are easily solved by simple agreements between the agents to act upon one, arbitrary chosen alternative, thus securing uniformity of action among them.

However, when a particular coordination problem is recurrent, and agreement is difficult to obtain, (mostly because of the large number of agents involved), a social rule is very likely to emerge, and this rule is a convention."

- Coleman

Natural Law
Majoritarian/Proselytizing Problem of the Categorical Imperative: "Non-Christians should be persecuted as heretics." "Religious law should be enforced." "My wife takes pleasure in whipping me, so I should submit to whippings."

Interpretivism
Ronald Dworkin's Legal Interpretivism