Wednesday 2 June 2010

Law & Nature

To ascertain whether Hayek is a natural law advocate or belongs to the legal positivism is an intricate task to perform. In the third volume of Law, Legislation and Liberty, he criticized Hans Kelsen for separating law from morals. Nevertheless, Hayek’s whole works reject neither the possibility of founding any legal system on a speculative construction of reason nor on a revealed code of conduct. Legal realism is not an option either, since he regarded it as too simplistic. In fact, the particular issue to address concerning Hayek’s jurisprudence is not law, but his idea of nature.