Social-Practice Legal Positivism and The Normativity Thesis

In this work, I critically engage with with a variant of contemporary legal positivism: the conceptual view of the nature of law based on the social thesis. For want of a better expression, I will refer to the specific account that will be discussed here as “social-practice legal positivism.” This variant of legal positivism will be introduced in Section 2, where we will look at its two main current instantiations, namely, legal conventionalism and the conception of law as a shared activity. Then, I will argue that social-practice legal positivism is incompatible with the recognition that law is intrinsically an obligation-engendering social practice.