Date: 2023
Type: Article
Participation and law’s authority
Canadian journal of law and jurisprudence, 2023, Vol. 36, No. 2, pp. 491-524
SOYEMI, Eniola Anuoluwapo, Participation and law’s authority, Canadian journal of law and jurisprudence, 2023, Vol. 36, No. 2, pp. 491-524
- https://hdl.handle.net/1814/76236
Retrieved from Cadmus, EUI Research Repository
This article argues that despite its claim to be most concerned with the nature of law in the generality of cases, legal positivism’s almost exclusive focus on Anglo-American law has prevented the tradition from adequately answering the question of law’s authority. This article argues that much positivist analysis either ignores, or takes for granted, the participation of the local population in the historical development of any given society’s law and legal system. This failing means that positivism, and much of analytical jurisprudence, does not provide a truly general, non-circular explanation of authority that accounts as equally for post-colonial legal systems as it does for the Anglo-American systems with which positivism has been most concerned. I argue that the conceptual inadequacies in the explanations of law and legitimate authority offered by those such as H.L.A. Hart and Joseph Raz are most clearly exposed by post-colonial cases, such as Nigeria.
Additional information:
Published online: 29 May 2023
Cadmus permanent link: https://hdl.handle.net/1814/76236
Full-text via DOI: 10.1017/cjlj.2023.9
ISSN: 0841-8209; 2056-4260
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Sponsorship and Funder information:
This article was published Open Access with the support from the EUI Library through the CRUI - CUP Transformative Agreement (2023-2025)
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