Philosophy allows people to study the nature of people’s beliefs. Throughout history people’s beliefs have differed. At one time people may believe one idea and decades later people may completely disagree with that idea. Not even the ideas of the law are exempt from this occurrence. Since the spoken word, hundreds of philosophers have defined law in different ways. Seeing law in different ways people can come to different conclusions about specific cases. The Fugitive Slave Law was a controversial law in American history. The Fugitive Slave Law allowed slave-owners to capture their slaves who have fled North to free states. In United States v Morris, the emancipators challenged the Fugitive Slave Law in Boston. A group of emancipators helped …show more content…
John Austin discusses positivism in his book “The Province of Jurisprudence Determined.” First, Austin defines natural law as physical laws such as gravity and, says the divine law is simply mortality. Positivism disagrees with nature law theory with morality’s role in our lives. A positivist believes laws already have morality embedded in them when legislators make them (Hart). Thus, all laws are moral for legislators made them. However, some laws do not have morality embedded in them. Austin calls the law “positive law”; these laws are part of our daily lives. These are the laws we follow every day. Austin also states laws are commands and if one was to not follow that command a political superior would place a sanction on them. According to a Austin, if someone broke a law and a superior placed no sanction a positivist would declare that the law not a law. In the case of morality, if the law is moral or not if people follow that law it is still a law. People follow the law because a judge enacts a sanction if the person does not follow the law. Sanctions lead people to follow laws if they are moral or not. Today, we can discern the Fugitive Slave Law as clearly immoral. Beside it not being moral, jurors in Boston were refusing to find people guilty of acting against the Fugitive Slave Law. To decide if the Fugitive Slave Law was, in fact, a law a …show more content…
Dworkin justifies this through he net-natural law theory. He believes that law and morality are entwined and sometimes judges engage in moral reasoning to decide on a case. Some cases are not clear in their morals like Aquinas says and this is true to what Dworkin believes. The moral answers is not always right in front of you. This may seem undemocratic to some people however, Dworkin reassures us that moral reasoning in law making is certainly democratic. To help us better understand the law making system, Dworkin tells us about a judge name Herculs and describes what Hercules would to in the case of legal question. Hercules would look at a list of rules and see what principles those rules come from. Rules expresses some higher principles and from these principles we can make legal decisions. This is what judges (or jurors) do. Dworkin feels principles that animate the legal system make the legal system just. These principles guide legislators to make laws to help society function in an orderly way. In this case, Dworkin would believe that rules must have some underlying principle deriving from morality. Dworkin theory of net-natural law theory derives from the natural law theory. This is similar to the thinking of Thomas Aquinas, as discussed previously. The jurors in Morris looked at the laws and then proceeded to see that the law does not follow