from Part III - Central Figures
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 January 2021
Starting out from the assumption that legal positivism is premised on the assumption of a strict separation between the world of law, the world of morals and the social or ethical world, Kersten explains that George Jellinek’s phenomenological theory of reflective legal positivism aims to answer the question of how the world of law is connected to and can respond to changes in the social world. The general idea of Jellinek’s legal positivism, Kersten explains, is that a state has two sides – a legal side and a social side – and three elements – people, territory and political power – and that these elements have to be structured and defined with the help of the concept of legal auto-limitation of political power, that is, the concept of the state’s capacity to limit its own power by incurring legally binding obligations. On this analysis, Kersten points out, the central element in Jellinek’s legal positivism is that of political power, which structures and defines the territory and the people (the citizens) and also structures and defines the state by binding it to legal rules, especially constitutional rules.
To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.
Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.
Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.