Abstract
Ordinary linguistic usage, then, plays a central role in determining the content of the concept of law. Tamanaha concludes that '[l]aw is whatever people identify and treat through their social practices as (or droit, recht, etc.)' (GJ 166; emphasis omitted). Socio-legal positivism is usefully characterized in terms of its relationship to Hartian positivism. Like Hartian positivism, socio-legal positivism accepts the Separability Thesis and the Social Fact Thesis, which, taken together, explain the content of law as manufactured through coordinated social practices of some sort.2 Unlike Hartian positivism, socio-legal positivism denies the following claims: (1) law has institutional features that are essential to its being characterized as 'law'; (2) law has something that is plausibly characterized as the function of law; (3) it is a conceptually necessary condition for the existence of a legal system that officials accept the norms defining the legality criteria as standards governing their behaviour; and (4) it is a conceptually necessary condition for the existence of law that legal norms are efficacious in guiding citizen behaviour.
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