Abstract

The author calls into question the possibility of a legal science in accordance with the requirements of normative legal positivism, which holds that to describe the law is to give an account of legal rights and duties. To evaluate the possibility of this program the author reformulates Joseph Raz’s thesis which states that legal scientists must adopt the legal point of view; to this end they must proffer statements of a peculiar type, which Raz has called detached legal statements. This paper attempts to show that even though the thesis can be rejected as Raz postulates it, this would risk discarding as “non-problematic” more than what is reasonable to discard. Thus, resorting to two familiar discussions in the philosophy of law, the “legal point of view thesis” is reformulated and shown as plausible.