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International Legal Positivism

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Introduction

Legal positivism has been the object of prolific discussions in legal theory and jurisprudence. The notion has similarly been the object extensive examination in international legal literature too. Yet, when discussed in relation to international law, the notion of legal positivism and the debates thereon have not always mirrored the contentions debated in legal theory and jurisprudence. The following sections leave aside the elements of the discussion of international legal positivism that strictly reflect the debates on legal positivism unfolding in legal theory and jurisprudence and, instead, zero in on the very specific ways in which the notion has been approached and debated in international legal thought.

In the international legal literature, legal positivism is commonly presented as a dominant school of thought and is associated with a wide series of grand claims, namely, state-centricism, voluntarism, immanent intelligibility, formalism and source-based...

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Correspondence to Jean d’Aspremont .

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d’Aspremont, J. (2017). International Legal Positivism. In: Sellers, M., Kirste, S. (eds) Encyclopedia of the Philosophy of Law and Social Philosophy. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-6730-0_63-1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-6730-0_63-1

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  • Print ISBN: 978-94-007-6730-0

  • Online ISBN: 978-94-007-6730-0

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