Normativity for Positivists

Much of the debate on the normativity of law is far from illuminating – it frequently uses ambiguous and/or undefined notions, it makes sometimes use of philosophical concepts and tools whose explanatory power with regard to the law is quite dubious, and it often mixes levels of discourse that are better kept separated. It is not surprising, then, that some effort has been recently devoted to introducing several distinctions within the province of the topic of the normativity of law, and also to downscaling the jurisprudential import of the normativity issue altogether. My own contribution, here, will be just in this spirit. To that end, I first introduce some distinctions that I deem important in the framework of any discussion about the normativity of law. Then, I take on the issue of the normativity of law, at least from the point of view of legal positivism. I conclude with a quick illustration of the implications of all this for some topics routinely discussed in the jurisprudential debate.