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  • 22 - Disruptive Implications of Legal Positivism’s Social Efficacy Thesis

  • from Part IV - Main Tenets
  • Edited by Torben Spaak, Stockholms Universitet, Patricia Mindus, Uppsala Universitet, Sweden
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Companion to Legal Positivism
    Published online:
    21 January 2021
    Print publication:
    04 February 2021, pp 512-535

  • Summary

    Tamanaha discusses the thesis of social efficacy. Having explained the import of the thesis, he argues that it is problematic in a number of ways. To begin with, not only are many legal systems not socially efficacious, because in many situations significant parts of the population do not obey the law, but it is also the case that two (or more) legal systems may be efficacious in the same society. Moreover, he argues, law-obedience, which is required by the social thesis and which involves as a conceptual matter at least a conscious attempt on the part of the citizens to follow the law, cannot be squared with the true empirical claim that many, perhaps most, people do not really know what the law requires of them; and this in turn means that we need a different conception of social efficacy, namely, one according to which the social efficacy of law is to be found in the constitutive use of law by government officials in combination with the activities of legal professionals who work to facilitate the aims of the people and organisations that hire them.