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The Pure Theory of Law

The idea of a Pure Theory of Law was propounded by the formidable Austrian jurist and philosopher Hans Kelsen (1881–1973) (see the bibliographical note). Kelsen began his long career as a legal theorist at the beginning of the 20th century. The traditional legal philosophies at the time, were, Kelsen claimed, hopelessly contaminated with political ideology and moralizing on the one hand, or with attempts to reduce the law to natural or social sciences, on the other hand. He found both of these reductionist endeavors seriously flawed. Instead, Kelsen suggested a ‘pure’ theory of law which would avoid reductionism of any kind. The jurisprudence Kelsen propounded “characterizes itself as a ‘pure’ theory of law because it aims at cognition focused on the law alone” and this purity serves as its “basic methodological principle” (PT1, 7).

1. The Basic Norm

2. relativism and reduction, 3. the normativity of law, primary sources, secondary sources, contemporary discussions and further reading, other internet resources, related entries.

The main challenge for a theory of law, as Kelsen saw it, is to provide an explanation of legality and the normativity of law, without an attempt to reduce jurisprudence, or “legal science”, to other domains. The law, Kelsen maintained, is basically a scheme of interpretation. Its reality, or objectivity, resides in the sphere of meaning; we attach a legal-normative meaning to certain actions and events in the world (PT1, 10). Suppose, for example, that a new law is enacted by the California legislature. How is it done? Presumably, some people gather in a hall, debate the issue, eventually raise their hands in response to the question of whether they approve a certain document or not, count the number of people who say “yes”, and then promulgate a string of words, etc. Now, of course, the actions and events described here are not the law. To say that the description is of the enactment of a new law is to interpret these actions and events in a certain way. But then, of course, the question is why certain acts or events have such a legal meaning and others don’t?

Kelsen’s answer to this question is surprisingly simple: an act or an event gains its legal-normative meaning by another legal norm that confers this normative meaning on it. An act can create or modify the law if it is created in accordance with another, “higher” legal norm that authorizes its creation in that way. And the “higher” legal norm, in turn, is legally valid if and only if it has been created in accord with yet another, “higher” norm that authorizes its enactment in that way. In other words: it is the law in the United States that the California legislature can enact certain types of laws. But what makes this the law? The California Constitution confers this power on the state legislature to enact laws within certain prescribed boundaries of content and jurisdiction. But then what makes the California Constitution legally valid? The answer is that the legal validity of the Constitution of California derives from an authorization granted by the US Constitution. What makes the US Constitution legally valid? Surely, not the fact that the US Constitution proclaims itself to be “the supreme law of the land”. Any document can say that, but only the particular document of the US Constitution is actually the supreme law in the United States.

The problem is that here the chain of authorization comes to an end: There isn’t a higher legal norm that authorizes the enactment of the (original) US Constitution. At this point, Kelsen famously argued, one must presuppose the legal validity of the Constitution. At some stage, in every legal system, we get to an authorizing norm that has not been authorized by any other legal norm, and thus it has to be presupposed to be legally valid. The normative content of this presupposition is what Kelsen has called the basic norm. The basic norm is the content of the presupposition of the legal validity of the (first, historical) constitution of the relevant legal system (GT, 110–111).

As Kelsen saw it, there is simply no alternative. More precisely, any alternative would violate David Hume’s injunction against deriving an “ought” from an “is”. Hume famously argued that any practical argument that concludes with some prescriptive statement, a statement of the kind that one ought to do this or that, would have to contain at least one prescriptive statement in its premises. If all the premises of an argument are descriptive, telling us what this or that is the case, then there is no prescriptive conclusion that can logically follow. Kelsen took this argument very seriously. He observed that the actions and events that constitute, say, the enactment of a law, are all within the sphere of what “is” the case, they are all within the sphere of actions and events that take place in the world. The law, or legal norms, are within the sphere of “ought”, they are norms that purport to guide conduct. Thus, to get an “ought” type of conclusion from a set of “is” premises, one must point to some “ought” premise in the background, an “ought” that confers the normative meaning on the relevant type of “is”. Since the actual, legal, chain of validity comes to an end, we inevitably reach a point where the “ought” has to be presupposed, and this is the presupposition of the basic norm.

The idea of the basic norm serves three theoretical functions in Kelsen’s theory of law: The first is to ground a non-reductive explanation of legal validity. The second function is to ground a non-reductive explanation of the normativity of law. The third function is to explain the systematic nature of legal norms. These three issues are not un-related.

Kelsen rightly noticed that legal norms necessarily come in systems. There are no free-floating legal norms. If, for example, somebody suggests that “the law requires a will to be attested by two witnesses”, one should always wonder which legal system is talked about; is it US law, Canadian law, German law, or the law in some other legal system? Furthermore, legal systems are themselves organized in a hierarchical structure, manifesting a great deal of complexity but also a certain systematic unity. We talk about Canadian law, or German law, etc., not only because these are separate countries in which there is law. They are also separate legal systems, manifesting a certain cohesion and unity. This systematic unity Kelsen meant to capture by the following two postulates:

• Every two norms that ultimately derive their validity from one basic norm belong to the same legal system.
• All legal norms of a given legal system ultimately derive their validity from one basic norm.

Whether these two postulates are actually true is a contentious issue. Joseph Raz argued that they are both inaccurate, at best. Two norms can derive their validity from the same basic norm, but fail to belong to the same system as, for example, in case of an orderly secession whereby a new legal system is created by the legal authorization of another. Nor is it necessarily true that all the legally valid norms of a given system derive their validity from the same basic norm (Raz 1979, 127–129).

Be this as it may, even if Kelsen erred about the details of the unity of legal systems, his main insight remains true, and quite important. It is true that law is essentially systematic, and it is also true that the idea of legal validity and law’s systematic nature are very closely linked. Norms are legally valid within a given system, they have to form part of a system of norms that is in force in a given place and time.

This last point brings us to another observation that is central to Kelsen’s theory, about the relations between legal validity and, what he called, “efficacy”. The latter is a term of art in Kelsen’s writings: A norm is efficacious if it is actually (generally) followed by the relevant population. Thus, “a norm is considered to be legally valid”, Kelsen wrote, “on the condition that it belongs to a system of norms, to an order which, on the whole, is efficacious” (GT, 42). So the relationship here is this: efficacy is not a condition of legal validity of individual norms. Any given norm can be legally valid even if nobody follows it. (e.g. think about a new law, just enacted; it is legally valid even if nobody has yet had an opportunity to comply with it.) However, a norm can only be legally valid if it belongs to a system, a legal order, that is by and large actually practiced by a certain population. And thus the idea of legal validity, as Kelsen admits, is closely tied to this reality of a social practice; a legal system exists, as it were, only as a social reality, a reality that consists in the fact that people actually follow certain norms.

What about the basic norm, is efficacy a condition of its validity? One might have thought that Kelsen would have opted for a negative answer here. After all, the basic norm is a presupposition that is logically required to render the validity of law intelligible. This would seem to be the whole point of an anti-reductionist explanation of legal validity: since we cannot derive an “ought” from an “is”, some “ought” must be presupposed in the background that would enable us to interpret certain acts or events as having legal significance. Kelsen, however, quite explicitly admits that efficacy is a condition of the validity of the basic norm: A basic norm is legally valid if and only if it is actually followed in a given population. In fact, as we shall see below, Kelsen had no choice here. And this is precisely why at least one crucial aspect of his anti-reductionism becomes questionable.

Common wisdom has it that Kelsen’s argument for the presupposition of the basic norm takes the form of a Kantian transcendental argument. The structure is as follows:

• P is possible only if Q
• P is possible (or, possibly P )
• Therefore, Q .

In Kelsen’s argument, P stands for the fact that legal norms are “ought” statements , and Q is the presupposition of the basic norm. In other words, the necessary presupposition of the basic norm is derived from the possibility conditions for ascribing legal significance to actions and events. In order to interpret an action as one of creating or modifying the law, it is necessary to show that the relevant legal significance of the act/event is conferred on it by some other legal norm. At some point, as we have noted, we necessarily run out of legal norms that confer the relevant validity on law creating acts, and at that point the legal validity has to be presupposed. The content of this presupposition is the basic norm.

It would be a mistake, however, to look for an explanation of Kelsen’s argument in the logic of Kant’s transcendental argument. (Kelsen himself seems to have changed his views about this over the years; he may have started with a kind of neo-Kantian perspective one can discern in PT1, and gradually shifted to a Humean version of his main argument, which is quite evident in GT. However, this is a very controversial issue; for a different view, see Paulson 2013 and Green 2016.) Kant employed a transcendental argument to establish the necessary presuppositions of some categories and modes of perception that are essential for rational cognition, or so he thought. They form deep, universal, and necessary features of human cognition. Suffice it to recall that it was Hume’s skepticism about knowledge that Kant strove to answer by his transcendental argument. Kelsen, however, remains much closer to Hume’s skeptical views than to Kant’s rationalism. In particular, Kelsen was very skeptical of any objective grounding of morality, Kant’s moral theory included. Kelsen’s view of morality was relativist all the way down. (More on this, below). Second, and not unrelated, as we shall see, Kelsen has explicitly rejected the idea that the basic norm (in law, or of any other normative domain) is something like a necessary feature or category of human cognition. The presupposition of a basic norm is optional. One does not have to accept the normativity of law; anarchism, as a rejection of law’s normative validity is certainly an option, Kelsen maintained. The basic norm is presupposed only by those who accept the “ought”, that is, the normative validity, of the law. But one is not rationally compelled to have this attitude:

The Pure Theory describes the positive law as an objectively valid order and states that this interpretation is possible only under the condition that a basic norm is presupposed…. The Pure Theory, thereby characterizes this interpretation as possible, not necessary, and presents the objective validity of positive law only as conditional—namely conditioned by the presupposed basic norm. (PT2, 217–218)

A comparison to religion, that Kelsen himself offered, might be helpful here. The normative structure of religion is very similar to that of law. It has the same logic: religious beliefs about what one ought to do ultimately derive from one’s beliefs about God’s commands. God’s commands, however, would only have normative validity for those who presuppose the basic norm of their respective religion, namely, that one ought to obey God’s commands. Thus the normativity of religion, like that of the law, rests on the presupposition of its basic norm. But in both cases, as, in fact, with any other normative system, the presupposition of the basic norm is logically required only of those who regard the relevant norms as reasons for their actions. Thus, whether you actually presuppose the relevant basic norm is a matter of choice, it is an ideological option, as it were, not something that is dictated by Reason. Similarly, the normativity of law, presupposed by its basic norm, is optional: “An anarchist, for instance, who denied the validity of the hypothetical basic norm of positive law…. will view its positive regulation of human relationships… as mere power relations” (GT, 413).

Relativism, however, comes with a price. Consider this question: What is the content of the basic norm that one needs to presuppose in order to render positive law intelligible as a normative legal order? The simple answer is that what one presupposes here is precisely the normative validity of positive law, namely, the law that is actually practiced by a certain population. The validity of the basic norm, as we noted briefly earlier, is conditional on its “efficacy”. The content of the basic norm of any given legal system is determined by the actual practices that prevail in the relevant community. As Kelsen himself repeatedly argued, a successful revolution brings about a radical change in the content of the basic norm. Suppose, for example, that in a given legal system the basic norm is that the constitution enacted by Rex One is binding. At a certain point, a coup d’etat takes place and a republican government is successfully installed. At this point, Kelsen admits, ‘one presupposes a new basic norm, no longer the basic norm delegating law making authority to the monarch, but a basic norm delegating authority to the revolutionary government’ (PT1, 59).

Has Kelsen just violated his own adherence to Hume’s injunction against deriving “ought” from an “is” here? One gets the clear impression that Kelsen was aware of a serious difficulty in his position. In both editions of the Pure Theory of Law, Kelsen toys with the idea that perhaps changes in the basic norms of municipal legal systems legally derive from the basic norm of public international law. It is a basic principle of international law that state sovereignty is determined by actual control over a territory/population (PT1 61–62, though in PT2, 214–215, the idea is presented with greater hesitation; notably, some commentators argue that Kelsen took the idea of a universal legal order much more seriously than suggested here—see Green 2016). But this led Kelsen to the rather uncomfortable conclusion that there is only one basic norm in the entire world, namely, the basic norm of public international law. Be this as it may, the main worry lies elsewhere. The worry stems from the fact that it is very difficult, if not impossible, to maintain both a profound relativist and an anti-reductionist position with respect to a given normative domain. If you hold the view that the validity of a type of norms is entirely relative to a certain vantage point—in other words, if what is involved here is only the actual conduct, beliefs/presuppositions and attitudes of people—it becomes very difficult to detach the explanation of that normative validity from the facts that constitute the relevant point of view (namely, the facts about people’s actions, beliefs, attitudes, etc). This is basically what was meant earlier by the comment that Kelsen had no option but to admit that the validity of the basic norm is conditional on its efficacy. The normative relativism which is inherent in Kelsen’s conception forces him to ground the content of the basic norm in the social facts that constitute its content, namely, the facts about actions, beliefs, and attitudes actually entertained by the population in question. And this makes it very questionable that reductionism can be avoided. In fact, what Kelsen really offered us here is an invitation to provide a reductive explanation of the concept of legal validity in terms of some set of social facts, the facts that constitute the content of any given basic norm. (Which is precisely the kind of reduction H.L.A. Hart later offered in his account of the Rules of Recognition as social rules [see Hart 1961, at p. 105, where Hart alludes to the difference between his conception of the rules of recognition and Kelsen’s idea of the basic norm.])

Kelsen’s problem here is not due to the fact that he was a relativist with respect to every normative system, like morality, religion etc.; it is not the scope of his relativism that is relevant to the question of reduction. The problem stems from the fact that Kelsen was quite right about the law. Legal validity is essentially relative to the social facts that constitute the content of the basic norm in each and every legal order. Notice that legal validity is always relative to a time and place. A law enacted by the California legislature only applies within the boundaries of the state of California, and it applies during a certain period of time, after its enactment and until a time when it is modified or repealed. And we can see why: because legal validity is determined by the content of the basic norm that is actually followed in a given society. The laws in UK, for example, are different from those in the US, because people (mostly judges and other officials) actually follow different rules, or basic norms, in Kelsen’s terminology, about what counts as law in their respective jurisdictions. Once Kelsen admits, as he does, that the content of a basic norm is fully determined by practice, it becomes very difficult to understand how the explication of legal validity he offers is non-reductive.

Let us now see how Kelsen thought that the basic norm helps to explain the sense in which law is a normative domain and what this normativity consists in. The first and crucial point to realize is that for Kelsen the idea of normativity is tantamount to a genuine “ought”, as it were; it is a justified demand on practical deliberation. A certain content is regarded as normative by an agent if and only if the agent regards that content as a valid reason for action. As Joseph Raz noticed, Kelsen agrees with the Natural Law tradition in this particular respect; both assume that the normativity of law can only be explained as one would explain the normativity of morality, or religion for that matter, namely, in terms of valid reasons for action (Raz 1979, 134–137; but cf. Paulson 2012). But then, the problem for Kelsen is how to explain the difference between the normativity of law and that of morality; if legal “ought” is a genuine “ought”, what makes a legal obligation distinct from a moral one? Kelsen’s answer is that the relevant “ought” is always relative to a given point of view. Each and every type of “ought”, be it religious, moral or legal, must presuppose a certain point of view, a point of view which is constituted by the basic norm of the relevant normative system.

In other words, Kelsen’s conception of legal normativity turns out to be a form of Natural Law completely relativized to a certain point of view. However, in Kelsen’s theory the relevant point of view is distinctly a legal one, not some general conception of morality or Reason. That these two basic norms, or points of view, can come apart, is nicely demonstrated by Kelsen’s comment that “even an anarchist, if he were a professor of law, could describe positive law as a system of valid norms, without having to approve of this law” (PT2 218n). The anarchist does not endorse the legal point of view as one that reflects her own views about what is right and wrong. Anarchism is understood here precisely as a rejection of the normative validity of law; however, even the anarchist can make an argument about what the law in this or that context requires; and when she makes such an argument, she must presuppose the legal point of view, she must argue as if she endorses the basic norm of the relevant legal system. Joseph Raz has called these kinds of statements “detached normative statements”; the anarchist argues as if she endorses the basic norm, without actually endorsing it. Another example that Raz gave is this: suppose that at Catholic priest is an expert in Jewish Law; the priest can make various interpretative arguments about what Jewish law really requires in this or that context. In such a case, the priest must argue as if he endorses the basic norm of Jewish Law, but of course, being a Catholic, he does not really endorse it, it does not reflect his own views about what is right and wrong (Raz 1979, 153–157).

So here is what emerges so far: the concept of normativity, the sense in which normative content is related to reasons for action, is the same across all normative domains. To regard something as normative is to regard it as justified, as a warranted requirement on practical deliberation. However, the difference resides in the difference in points of view. Each basic norm determines, as it were, a certain point of view. So it turns out that normativity (contra Kant) always consists of conditional imperatives: if, and only if, one endorses a certain normative point of view, determined by its basic norm, then the norms that follow from it are reason giving, so to speak. This enables Kelsen to maintain the same understanding of the nature of normativity as Natural Law’s conception, namely, normativity qua reasons for action, without having to conflate the normativity of morality with that of law. In other words, the difference between legal normativity and, say, moral normativity, is not a difference in normativity (viz, about the nature of normativity, per se), but only in the relevant vantage point that is determined by their different basic norms. What makes legal normativity unique is the uniqueness of its point of view, the legal point of view, as it were.

We can set aside the difficulties that such a view raises with respect to morality. Obviously, many philosophers would reject Kelsen’s view that moral reasons for action only apply to those who choose to endorse morality’s basic norm (whatever it may be). Even if Kelsen is quite wrong about this conditional nature of moral imperatives, he may be right about the law. What remains questionable, however, is whether Kelsen succeeds in providing a non-reductive explanation of legal normativity, given the fact that his account of legal validity turned out to be reductive after all. The trouble here is not simply the relativity to a point of view; the trouble resides in Kelsen’s failure to ground the choice of the relevant point of view in anything like Reason or reasons of any kind. By deliberately avoiding any explanation of what it is that might ground an agent’s choice of endorsing the legal point of view, or any given basic norm, Kelsen left the most pressing questions about the normativity of law unanswered. Instead of providing an explanation of what makes the presupposition of the legal point of view rational, or what makes it rational to regard the requirements of law as binding requirements, Kelsen invites us to stop asking.

Kelsen’s academic publications span over almost seven decades in which he published dozens of books and hundreds of articles. Only about a third of this vast literature has been translated to English. Kelsen’s two most important books on the pure theory of law are the first edition of his Reine Rechtslehre , published in 1934 and recently (2002) translated. The second edition, which Kelson published in 1960 (translated in 1967) is a considerably extended version of the first edition. In addition, most of the themes in these two books also appear in Kelsen’s General Theory of Law and State . These three works are cited in text as follows:

Other relevant publications in English include:

• 1957, What is Justice? , Berkeley: University of California Press.
• 1941, ‘The Pure Theory of Law and Analytical Jurisprudence’, Harvard Law Review , 55: 44–70.
• 1965, ‘Professor Stone and the Pure Theory of Law: A Reply’, Stanford Law Rev , 17(6): 1128–1157.
• 1966, ‘On the Pure Theory of Law’, Israel Law Review , 1(1): 1–7.

For a complete list of Kelsen’s publications that have appeared in English see the Appendix to H. Kelsen, General Theory of Norms , M. Hartney (trans.), Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991, pp. 440–454.

• Green, S.M., 2016, “Marmor’s Kelsen”, in D.A. Jeremy Telman (ed.), Hans Kelsen in America , Dordrecht: Springer Verlag.
• Harris, J.W., 1980, Legal Philosophies (Chapter 6), London: Butterworths.
• Hart, H.L.A., 1961, The Concept of Law (Chapter 3), Oxford: Clarendon Press.
• –––, 1970, “Kelsen’s Doctrine of the Unity of Law”, in H.E. Kiefer and M.K. Munitz (eds.), Ethics and Social Justice , New York: State University of New York Press, pp. 171–199.
• Marmor, A., 2001, Objective Law and Positive Values , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• –––, 2011, Philosophy of Law , The Princeton Series in the Foundations of Contemporary Philosophy (S. Soames ed.), Chapter 1, Princeton: Princeton University Press.
• Paulson, S., 2002, Introduction to Kelsen’s Introduction to the Problems of Legal Theory , Oxford: Clarendon Press, p. xvii.
• –––, 2012. “A ‘Justified Normativity’ Thesis in Hans Kelsen’s Pure Theory of Law? Rejoinders to Robert Alexy and Joseph Raz”, in Matthias Klatt (ed.), Institutionalized Reason: The Jurisprudence of Robert Alexy , Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 61–111.
• –––, 2013. “The Great Puzzle: Kelsen’s Basic Norm”, in Luis Duarte d’Almeida, John Gardner, and Leslie Green (eds.), Kelsen Revisited: New Essays on the Pure Theory of Law , Oxford: Hart Publishing, pp. 43–62.
• Raz, J., 1980, The Concept of a Legal System , 2 nd edition, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• –––, 1979, ‘Kelsen’s Theory of the Basic Norm’, in J. Raz, The Authority of Law , Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 122–145.
• Tur, R.H. & W. Twining (eds.), 1986, Essays on Kelsen , Oxford: Clarendon Press.
• Bix, B., 2018, “Kelsen, Hart, and Legal Normativity”, Revus , 34: 1–17, doi:10.4000/revus.3984
• Gragl, P., 2017, “In Defence of Kelsenian Monism: Countering Hart and Raz”, Jurisprudence , 8(2): 287–318.
• Green, S. M., 2021, “Hans Kelsen’s Non-Reductive Positivism”, in T. Spaak & P. Mindus (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Legal Positivism , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 272–300.
• Guastini, R., 2016, “Kelsen on Validity (Once More)”, Ratio Juris , 29: 402–409.
• Langford, P., Bryan, I., & McGarry, J. (eds.), 2017, Kelsenian Legal Science and the Nature of Law , Cham: Springer.
• Orakhelashvili, A., 2019, Domesticating Kelsen: Towards the Pure Theory of English Law , Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Publishing
• Pavlakos, G., 2018, “Non-naturalism, Normativity and the Meaning of Ought: Some Lessons from Kelsen”, in K. E. Himma, M. Jovanovic & B. Spaic (eds.), Unpacking Normativity Conceptual, Normative, and Descriptive Issues , Oxford: Hart Publishing, pp. 77–94.
• Paulson, S. L., 2019, “Hans Kelsen on Legal Interpretation, Legal Cognition, and Legal Science”, Jurisprudence , 10(2): 188–221.
• –––2017, “Metamorphosis in Hans Kelsen’s Legal Philosophy”, Moderna Law Review , 80(5): 860–894.
• –––2018, “The Purity Thesis”, Ratio Juris , 31(3): 276–306.
• Spaak, T., 2018, “A Challenge to Bix’s Interpretation of Kelsen and Hart’s Views on the Normativity of Law”, Revus , 37: 75–82, doi:10.4000/revus.4561

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Legal Positivism by Michael Sevel , Brian Leiter LAST REVIEWED: 18 November 2022 LAST MODIFIED: 10 May 2010 DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780195396577-0065

Legal positivism is one of the leading philosophical theories of the nature of law, and is characterized by two theses: (1) the existence and content of law depends entirely on social facts (e.g., facts about human behavior and intentions), and (2) there is no necessary connection between law and morality—more precisely, the existence and content of a law do not depend on its merits or demerits (e.g., whether or not it lives up to the ideals of justice, democracy, or morality). The theory has enjoyed a large number of adherents since it was first articulated by Jeremy Bentham in the 18th century and has undergone considerable modification and development since then. Legal positivism is accepted today by most Anglophone philosophers of law, though natural law theories, its natural opponents, continue to challenge positivism’s fundamental claims.

The two most important statements of positivism in the 20th century are Hart 1997 (originally published 1961) and Kelsen 1970 (first published in 1934). Hart was influenced by earlier British positivists like Austin and Bentham, as well as the later Wittgenstein, but his has proven to be the most influential text on positivism in the English-speaking world. Hart argues that every legal system is a union of obligation-imposing (“primary”) rules and power-conferring (“secondary”) social rules; in the latter case, a sufficient number of officials of the system accept those rules as guides to their conduct and standards of evaluation of the conduct of other legal participants. The most fundamental secondary rule of the system is what Hart calls a “rule of recognition,” which specifies the ultimate criteria of legal validity (e.g., “what Parliament enacts is law”). Hart’s discussion served as the focal point of nearly all discussions of legal positivism since its publication in 1961. The second edition ( Hart 1997 ) includes a posthumously published postscript in which Hart addresses primarily the criticisms of Ronald Dworkin, a response which has itself spawned a considerable literature. Kelsen’s theory is also one of the great positivist theories of the 20th century and is inspired more by certain themes in European (and particularly Neo-Kantian) philosophy. Kelsen’s texts have been less influential in the Anglophone world and received much less scholarly attention, due no doubt to his difficult and sometimes obscure prose. Green 2003 gives a thorough and up-to-date overview of the various competing positivist theories and contains a short but reliable bibliography for further reading. Leiter 2003 and Shapiro 2007 give useful summaries of the dialectic between positivists and their critics over the past three decades. Gardner 2001 takes a different tack by illuminating the nature of positivism by distinguishing it from other views which are often mistakenly identified as central to positivism.

Gardner, John. “Legal Positivism: 5 1/2 Myths.” American Journal of Jurisprudence 46 (2001): 199–227.

Extensive and wide-ranging discussion distinguishing legal positivism from many other views with which it is often confused. An important article, though most useful to those with a basic knowledge of the scholarly literature.

Green, Leslie. “ Legal Positivism .” In The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy . Edited by Edward N. Zalta. 2003.

This is a general but succinct overview of the history and development of positivism since its inception. Also a brief discussion of the broader methodological problem of the role of evaluation in constructing theories of law, an issue which has moved to the forefront of debate among positivists and legal theorists more generally. A good introduction for undergraduates, graduate students, and scholars alike.

Hart, H. L. A. The Concept of Law . 2d ed. Oxford: Clarendon, 1997.

Originally published 1961, Hart’s book is by far the most influential statement of legal positivism in the English-speaking world of the 20th century. Hart’s style is admirably clear and accessible, so this is a suitable introduction for undergraduates as well as graduate students and scholars.

Kelsen, Hans. Pure Theory of Law . Translated by Max Knight. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970.

English translation of the second edition of the Reine Rechtslehre , published in 1960 (a significant expansion and revision of the 1934 book of the same name). With Hart 1997 , one of the major statements of legal positivism in the 20th century. Kelsen’s positivism, however, has been somewhat less influential among Anglophone legal philosophers. Kelsen is difficult, but he is essential reading for graduate students and scholars.

Leiter, Brian. “Beyond the Hart/Dworkin Debate: The Methodology Problem in Jurisprudence.” American Journal of Jurisprudence 48 (2003): 17–51.

The first half of the essay gives an overview of Hart’s theory, Dworkin’s criticisms of that theory, and replies to those criticisms and developments of positivism, especially in the work of Raz. Usefully compared with Shapiro 2007 . Reprinted in Leiter’s Naturalizing Jurisprudence: Essays on American Legal Realism and Naturalism in Legal Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).

MacCormick, Neil. H. L. A. Hart . 2d ed. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008.

An authoritative introduction to all aspects of Hart’s work in legal philosophy, including his positivist theory of law.

Shapiro, Scott J. “The ‘Hart-Dworkin’ Debate: A Short Guide for the Perplexed.” In Ronald Dworkin . Edited by Arthur Ripstein, 22–55. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2007.

The first half of the paper consists of another survey of the dialectic between Hart and his critics, especially Dworkin. Differs from Leiter 2003 in arguing that Dworkin’s Law’s Empire ( Dworkin 2003 , cited under Dworkin’s Later Criticisms ) developed a criticism—how to explain “theoretical disagreements” in law—to which positivists failed to respond. Concludes with a somewhat extravagant “positivist” response to the problem of theoretical disagreement. See also Criticisms of Positivism .

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Essays in Legal and Moral Philosophy

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20 Hegel’s Philosophy of Law

Thom Brooks is the Dean of Durham Law School and Professor of Law and Government at Durham University, with associate membership in the Department of Philosophy and the School of Government and International Affairs and Fellow of University College, Durham.

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Hegel was neither a lawyer nor primarily a legal theorist, but his writings make a significant influence to the understanding of legal philosophy. Nevertheless, there is disagreement about where Hegel’s importance lies. This chapter argues that Hegel’s philosophy of law is best understood as a natural law theory. But what is interesting about Hegel’s view is that it represents a distinctive alternative to how most natural law theories are traditionally conceived. Hegel’s philosophy is remarkable for providing an entirely new way of thinking about the relation between law and morality than had been considered before. It is the distinctiveness of his legal philosophy that has rendered so difficult a categorization into standard jurisprudential schools of thought. There is little that is standard in Hegel’s innovative understanding of law. This has importance for other areas of his thinking, such as his novel theory of punishment and understanding of the common law.

20.1. Introduction

G. W. F. HEGEL was neither a lawyer nor primarily a legal theorist, but his writings make a significant contribution to our understanding of legal philosophy. Hegel’s primary contribution is his Philosophy of Right , although he provides us with important insights in other works, such as his Philosophy of History and even The Science of Logic . No survey of the history of legal philosophy is complete without Hegel. While there is no disputing his importance, there is disagreement about where Hegel’s importance lies. Scholarly positions range widely, from the view that Hegel defends a theory of freedom to a philosophy of despotism. 1 There is further debate about which view about the nature of law best fits Hegel’s legal philosophy.

I argue that Hegel’s philosophy of law is best understood as a natural law theory. But what is interesting about Hegel’s view is that it represents a distinctive alternative to how most natural law theories are traditionally conceived. Hegel’s philosophy is remarkable for providing an entirely new way of thinking about the relation between law and morality than had been considered before. It is the distinctiveness of his legal philosophy that has rendered so difficult an easy categorizing into standard jurisprudential schools of thought. There is little that is standard in Hegel’s innovative understanding of law.

The chapter proceeds as follows. I begin with an overview of leading natural law theorists from antiquity to today. Natural law is a wide tent composed of diverse views, but virtually all endorse some view of what I call natural law externalism : the idea that we determine moral standards for judging legal systems outside of them. The following section argues that Hegel supports natural law internalism : this is the view that we assess legal systems using moral standards found within them. Our moral assessment of law is internal and not external. This represents an important divergence from the natural law tradition that Hegel pioneered. The following sections consider implications of Hegel’s jurisprudence for the relation of the judiciary to the public and his often misunderstood theory of punishment.

20.2. Natural Law Externalism: Old and New

Natural law casts a large net, encompassing a wide array of theoretical perspectives. They are loosely bound together by a shared conviction that law and morality are interconnected: to say something is ‘law’ is to say something about its morality. Despite their many differences, natural law theories also understand the relation of law and morality in a particular way, as what I call natural law externalism . This is the view that we understand morality externally from the law and use our moral standard as an external measure of legal validity. This picture of the natural law tradition holds for most classical and contemporary natural law theorists. I explain this here in order to show in the next section that Hegel’s philosophy of law represents an important break from this tradition because it conceives of law and morality in a different relationship.

Classical natural law is perhaps best stated by Cicero:

True law is right reason in agreement with nature; it is of universal application, unchanging and everlasting; it summons to duty by its commands, and averts from wrongdoing by its prohibitions. And it does not lay its commands or prohibitions upon good men in vain, although neither have any effect on the wicked. It is a sin to try to alter this law, nor is it allowable to attempt to repeal any part of it, and it is impossible to abolish it entirely … there will not be different laws at Rome and at Athens, or different laws now and in the future, but one eternal and unchangeable law will be valid for all nations and all times, and there will be one master and ruler, that is, God, over us all, for he is the author of this law, its promulgator, and its enforcing judge. Whoever is disobedient is fleeing from himself and denying his human nature, and by reasons of this very fact he will suffer the worst penalties, even if he escapes what is commonly considered punishments. 2

There are five central tenets of classical natural law that we can discern from this statement. 3 The first is that we can distinguish between ‘law’ and ‘true law’. This is the difference between what is merely legal and what should always be legal. For example, it may be considered merely legal in this sense that a contract can allow a specific number of workdays during which it can be voided without penalty. It might be said that this is mostly a contingent matter because what is most important is the centrality of our consent to making any contract binding. Natural lawyers understand ‘true law’ as not a contingent or non-essential matter, but something more perfect. Not all laws share the same status: while all laws are part of a legal system, some are more central and ideal than others.

A second tenet of classical natural law is that we can make the distinction between law and true law by using a standard of moral justice. This links with a third tenet: that law is more ‘true’ the closer it coheres with a standard of moral justice. So we can distinguish between law and true law by considering how well law satisfies a moral standard. True laws more perfectly embody moral justice, and the merely legal occupy the opposite side of the spectrum. Morality is relevant for the study of law because it reveals how well the law meet standards of moral justice. Law should not be understood separately from morality and, more specifically, from a standard of moral justice.

Perhaps the greatest disagreement among classical natural lawyers concerns identifying the correct moral standard we should use in weighing up how ‘true’ our laws are. Most, if not all, follow Cicero’s comments and identify true law as meeting some divine threshold. But where we should draw lines in confirming and applying these standards can differ virtually from one natural lawyer to the next.

A fourth central tenet of classical natural law is that the standard of moral justice is external and applied in our normative assessment of law. We are to consider first what should serve as a satisfactory standard of moral justice. Once this is identified, our moral standard is to be applied to our laws to see how ‘true’, or morally just, they are. But the standard we hold the law to is external to the law. We do not look first to the law to see what moral standards may already be embedded. Instead, we consider which moral standard the law should satisfy and then apply this external to the law standard to judge how just our laws are.

A final central tenet is specific only to classical natural law theorists. It is that the ‘true’ law is universally and eternally true. So for Cicero, the most just laws are applicable everywhere at all times without exception: what is a true law for Rome will be equally true for New York or New Delhi. This is the case whether we speak of the past, the present, or the future: the most perfect law is perfect for every people and every age; it does not change over time.

Contemporary natural lawyers agree with many of these tenets. Specifically, they agree that a standard of moral justice should be used to consider how just our laws are. This standard should be determined first externally to the law and then applied in our assessment of the law. Contemporary natural lawyers are deeply divided over what should serve as the most satisfactory standard, but they generally agree on an important break from natural law’s classical tradition. This is that contemporary theorists do not tend to link the most just with the divine. One implication is that the majority may find a particular view of morality most justified, but few claim this supports the view that there is one and only one supremely just legal system everywhere at any time.

This can be explained partly by the Enlightenment’s clear transition away from the view of all true law as divine to the idea of just laws grounded in compelling reasons. This speaks to H. L. A. Hart’s definition of natural law as “that there are certain principles of human conduct, awaiting discovery by human reason, with which man-made law must conform if it is to be valid.” 4 Contemporary natural lawyers give greater weight to the use of reason in justifying the best standard of moral justice to assess the law.

For example, consider two different and influential contemporary natural law theories. The first is the natural law theory of John Finnis. His perspective is more traditional than most today. For instance, he claims that through reason we can identify seven basic forms of the human good. These include goods such as knowledge, play, and sociability. 5 Each is discoverable through our practical reflection on what basic forms of the good we might possess. These goods are understood as things worth having for a minimally decent human life. We undertake this task first before considering its legal application. Once we have identified these goods, this helps us structure our moral appraisal of law: “they lay down for us the outlines of everything one could reasonably want to do, to have, and to be.” 6 So we determine basic forms of the good first, and then apply them in assessing law.

Of course, our use of practical reasoning may lead us to consider different forms of the good from those that Finnis identifies. Or we might disagree on how some forms come to serve as basic human goods. The points that I want to raise are, first, that our determining a moral standard is prior to our determining the relative moral justice of our laws and that, second, this standard is considered independently of the legal system we apply it to. Our moral standard is external to the law. Finnis is an example of one kind of what we might call natural law externalism, but so is Cicero because he has a view of divine justice first, which is then applied to law.

Now consider Lon Fuller’s natural law approach as a second example of a contemporary natural lawyer whose view is compatible with natural law externalism in a different way. Fuller defends what he calls “the inner morality of law.” 7 The inner morality he identifies is not, perhaps confusingly, a morality that is internal to the law. Instead, Fuller engages in practical reasoning to discover eight principles that he claims any legal system ought to satisfy. 8 These principles include the guarantee to “make the law known, make it coherent and clear … etc.” 9 Fuller’s principles require legal systems to provide general laws that are publicly accessible and not retrospective. If any of his eight principles is not met, then Fuller says that this “does not simply result in a bad system of law; it results in something that is not properly called a legal system at all.” 10

What Fuller calls law’s ‘inner morality’ does not, in fact, emanate and develop from within a legal system. Law’s morality is grasped externally by reason in response to circumstances. Fuller illustrates the application of morality to law with the example of our visiting a former minister of justice in Poland. The minister recounts how his government endeavored to make the law clear and well known by its citizens, but unfortunately this came at a hidden cost that making laws more understandable “rendered their application by the courts more capricious and less predictable.” 11 Fuller argues that we should balance adhering as best we can to our moral principles in light of the changing circumstances that confront us. His is a project of determining these principles first, and then applying them to the law as a standard for law’s moral assessment. 12

Unsurprisingly, Fuller refers to his approach as “a procedural version of natural law theory.” 13 For this reason, he can be understood to offer a more formalistic model of natural law. There is much of interest in Fuller’s approach. One attraction is that his procedural approach in attempting to flesh out minimal moral conditions that any just legal system should satisfy addresses the criticism faced by many natural law views that they are too demanding because they are only satisfied when people act like angels. But two key points concern us here. One is that Fuller identifies a standard of moral justice first—that is to be applied later in a moral assessment of the law. Our moral standard for judging the justice of our laws comes prior to the laws themselves. Second, this standard is determined independently of our legal system.

In sum, this section provides important background about natural law theories old and new. Each accepts several tenets in common. They recognize that some laws are more morally satisfactory than others. They claim that this is to be determined through applying a standard of moral justice and, crucially, this standard is determined separately from the legal system to which it is applied.

My point is not to argue that the moral standards used lack any basis in real life and are always a product of speculation, but rather that the standards—however realistic or compelling—are not chosen on the basis of any particular moral standard found within a legal system. Instead, moral standards are determined externally to a legal system. Law and morality may be intrinsically linked, but they are also potentially separable. Natural law theorists may have different views on which moral standard is best, but most can recognize an immoral legal system as a legal system. Laws should aspire to compatibility with justice, but they can often fall far short. They remain law either way, even if some are more morally meritorious and just than others.

20.3. Hegel’s Natural Law Internalism

The natural law tradition is a diverse array of different perspectives, rich in diversity. The previous section argued that both classical natural law and the leading contemporary natural law theorists share something in common: they all argue for an external understanding of morality that we then apply to our analysis of law as a standard of moral justice. There will be divergent approaches to how this shared practice is conducted. Cicero argues that we must grasp ‘true reason’ that is divine in nature, Finnis claims that we should identify basic forms of the human good through reason, and Fuller highlights moral principles that any legal system should embody. The point is that each identifies a moral standard first and then applies it to law afterward: we discern morality externally and then analyze law in light of this standard.

This discussion is important because it underscores the distinctive break from standard natural law theorizing that Hegel’s legal philosophy represents. While his views are correctly understood by most as consistent with natural law, the precise connection between Hegel’s views and the standard natural law tradition is overlooked or unnoticed: for most scholars, Hegel endorses natural law theory in an indistinctive way. 14 But this conclusion is a mistake.

The view that Hegel is an indistinctive natural lawyer is not shared by all commentators. Hegel’s legal philosophy has been thought to belong to jurisprudential schools as diverse as the historical school of jurisprudence, Marxist legal theory, postmodern critical theory, and transcendental idealist legal theory. 15 This wide disparity of opinion is unique to Hegel. There is no similar disagreement about any other significant legal philosopher.

This disagreement arises from the fact that Hegel’s legal philosophy does not fit traditional jurisprudential molds. This is because it defends a novel understanding about the relation of law and morality that has gone unnoticed. In short, Hegel offers what I will call a view of natural law internalism . 16 All natural law theorists claim that law and morality are linked, but while traditional natural law theorists first determine moral standards to then be applied in an assessment of law, the natural law internalism of Hegel assesses law through moral standards arising within the law itself. This section presents why Hegel’s legal theory should be located with the natural law tradition—and why it provides us with an innovative understanding of how law and morality should relate that offers a distinctive break from other natural law theorists.

Hegel accepts a core tenet of natural law about law and morality. He argues, “To the Ideal of Freedom, Law and Morality are indispensably requisite” (PH, 41). Law and morality are not independent of each other, but instead interdependent. This puts Hegel clearly at odds with positivists who claim that our study of law is about rules where morality may play no part. 17

Like many traditional views of natural law, Hegel believes that law becomes more substantiated—or ‘true’ or ‘actual’—when it better satisfies a moral standard by embodying a specific form of normativity. Some laws are more valid and authoritative the greater they cohere with this moral standard. Hegel says that “what is law [ Geist ] may differ in content from what is right in itself [ an sich Recht ]” (PR §212). So what is lawful might not be rightful. Slavery is an example of this. For Hegel, slavery was both legal and unjust ( LNR , §8R). Laws become less unjust the more they achieve a ‘realization [ Verwirklichung ]’ of ‘Right [ Recht ]’ whereby the law better embodies justice (E §529).

Hegel’s discussion of law plays on an ambiguity in his native German language using both Recht and Gesetz . Both words can be translated as ‘law’, but Hegel uses them in specific ways. He refers to law or a statute as Gesetz and reserves Recht for true law, or justice. Their difference is that only the latter is commensurate with justice. All other forms of positive laws ( Gesetz ) embody lesser forms of justice ( Recht ). They come together in the following way, Hegel says: “actual legal relationships presuppose laws founded on right [ Rechtsgesetz ] as something valid in and for itself” (LNR, §109). The recognition of a law is to assume it embodies some measure of justice. We do not then presume that our laws are inherently unjust. But it is a widely held concern that where laws are found to fall short of some compelling moral standard, this requires laws to be changed or terminated. 18 The discovery of unjust laws compels us toward making revisions so that our legal system moves closer toward justice.

Hegel argues that our understanding of law must start from the law itself. He says that “what is legal [ gesetzmäßig ] is … the source of cognition of what is right [ Recht ], or more precisely, of what is lawful [ Rechtens ].” So we are not to begin our appraisal—moral or otherwise—of the law until we first have an understanding about the law. We should discern what is right from the raw material that is the law itself: in other words, justice springs forth from the law. Our normative assessment of law develops from within the law internally: what is right ( Recht ) is instantiated from within what is lawful ( Rechtens ) (PR §3). Hegel says, “Law is part of the existing state of things, with Spirit implicit in it” (PH, 268). The law is not separable from its spirit. Our understanding of the law is therefore grounded in doctrine: it must be an account of “ the present and the actual , not the setting up of a world beyond which exists God knows where” (PR 14,1.13/20). Hegel sees his view of natural law as embedded in our practices.

Hegel’s natural law internalism occupies an interesting, and even novel, jurisprudential space. Like legal positivists, his focus is on the law itself. Hegel does not argue for assessing the law according to some standard that is outside and so external to the law. Hegel’s legal theory accepts natural law’s commitment to claiming that our understanding of law is intrinsically bound with our normative assessment of law. But we can now see that Hegel’s legal theory represents a distinctive break from this tradition insofar as only Hegel claims that the normative standard for assessing law is to be found within the law itself.

Hegel similarly understands legal development as an internal process. Robert Stern captures well how this should be considered:

we can use here an “internal” notion of rationality, whereby it is rational to change from one outlook or theory to another not because the latter possesses the transcendental predicate of “truth” or “absolute validity,” but rather because it represents a resolution of the problems, incoherences, anomalies, inconsistencies and limitations of the previous scheme or theory, and so constitutes an advance on it, in relative, but not absolute terms. 19

This passage recommends a view about internal progress that speaks to Hegel’s idea of law’s immanent development over time. This legal progress is perhaps best understood as a series of resolutions, or inconsistencies and anomalies within the law. So the law does not simply ‘develop’ per se, but develops through overcoming its own incoherencies. Hegel recognizes that the law might instead appear to us as little more than “a collection without principle, whose inconsistencies and confusion require the most acute perception to rescue it as far as possible from its contradictions” (GC, 11) The law can look this way because of the contingencies about how it is forged. A state’s legislation is rarely a seamless, coherent expression of a particular moral perspective. Instead, it is more commonly a product of political compromises peppered with statements about judicial doctrine and the rule of law from the judiciary’s case law. These sources of law can sometimes be in tension, such as where an appointed judiciary finds unconstitutional—and so unlawful—legislation passed by elected representatives. Famous cases abound, such as Brown v. Board of Education , which ended the segregation of US students based on their race/ethnicity. 20

The law resolves its own tensions and incoherencies arising from the law’s contingent existence through particular statutes, secondary legislation, or authoritative case law. The law does this from within its own resources (PR §216). Hegel says,

the advance from that which constitutes the beginning is to be considered only as one more determination of the same advance, so that this beginning remains as the underlying ground of all that follows without vanishing from it. (SL 21.58/49)

The kind of progress that Hegel has in mind here is a progressive comprehension. In this case, our focus is a progressive comprehension of law. Our comprehension develops from within the law’s own normative content (PR §31). Its beginning does not ‘vanish’, but our understanding of it does as we develop clearer insights into law’s normative content.

Law’s internal development is a dynamic process. Hegel says that “the scope of the law [ Gesetz ] ought on the one hand to be that of a complete and self-contained whole, but on the other hand, there is a constant need for new legal determinations [ gesetzlicher Bestimmungen ]” (PR §216, and see §3R). In other words, the legal system is ‘complete’ insofar as a progressive understanding of its normativity need not warrant there be more laws imposed from outside itself. The law has all the resources it requires at the beginning for internal moral development. To grasp what shape this should take requires our looking more carefully at the laws we already have and not looking beyond to norms or laws we want to find.

Hegel clarifies these points further:

an advance of the analytic intellect, which discovers new distinctions, which again make new decisions necessary. To provisions of this sort one may give the name of new decisions or new laws [ Gesetze ]; but in proportion to the gradual advance in specialization the interest and value of these provisions declines. They fall within the already subsisting “substantial,” general laws, like improvements on a floor or a door, within the house—which though something new , are not a new house . (E §529)

Hegel’s point is that as we solve internal incoherencies within the law according to its normativity and not from some external source, we may be mistaken into thinking we have created new laws. This view is mistaken because we are not creating new laws, but newly discovering what is already lawful—the law’s previously unrecognized content. Hegel views the law as a seamless web. When we better articulate the law’s internal normative content, our understanding of law becomes richer as these determinations are made explicit. The law progresses through resolving internal conflicts and by filling apparent gaps.

Law progresses toward justice. Hegel says that justice has its “existence [ Dasein ] in the form of law [ Gesetzes ]” and not “particular volitions and opinions” (PR §219). Law develops into justice through our “cognition of what is right [ Recht ], or more precisely, of what is lawful [ Rechtens ]” (PR §212R). We fill gaps and overcome incoherencies through codification. Hegel assumes that no political community will construct a timeless, unproblematic legal system on its first attempt. Legal codes are everywhere incomplete, although some are less finished than others (PR §211R).

A community’s development of law is “the work of centuries,” not to be completed overnight (PR §274A). Progressing our understanding of law toward justice is “a perennial approximation to perfection [ Volkommenheit das Perennieren der Annäherung ]” that we may never achieve fully (PR §216R). Hegel does not claim there is any one set of laws or legal system that is everywhere ideal at all times. Philosophy, for Hegel, is “a peculiar mode of thinking” (E §2) examining “ what is there before us ” (SL, 21.55/47). Philosophy allows us to better understand our past and gain insight into our present, but it is fundamentally historical: every individual is a “child of his time” and “philosophy, too, is its own time comprehended in thoughts” (PR 14,1.15/21). Any philosophical assessment is provisional and open to future revision over time. 21

20.4. Justice in Robes?

Hegel’s understanding of natural law as a form of natural law internalism is a break from natural law’s traditional externalism. But is Hegel’s internalism preferable?

Natural law externalist theories expose themselves to the charge that they seek to impose a moral standard in determining law’s validity, but their standards stand in need of further justification. This presents natural law externalism with two problems. The first is the need to justify that moral standards should determine legal validity. It might be countered that laws are valid if approved through agreed-upon procedures, but we can have unjust laws as valid laws. So what should serve as the appropriate moral standard? Natural lawyers are deeply divided over which is the most compelling. For example, Cicero might claim consistency with God’s commands, Finnis favors compatibility of basic forms of human goods, and Fuller endorses our satisfying a threshold of his inner morality of law test, to name but three different types of external moral standards.

The problem is not only that each natural lawyer may well either defend different moral standards or apply these standards differently, but more centrally that each understands the study of law through moral philosophy. This is a problem because there may be practical limits to how far moral philosophy can and should go in our working out a legal system that is just. One example is Immanuel Kant’s well-known division in The Metaphysics of Morals between the doctrine of right, where morality is relevant for forging and maintaining political and legal institutions, and the doctrine of virtue, where institutions become irrelevant. 22 So even if we could agree on a moral standard, there might be limits to its application in a legal system. But our focus remains on getting the moral philosophy right first: law might appear to almost get in the way of our enacting a preferred moral vision.

Hegel’s natural law internalism rejects this approach. While he accepts that legal philosophy is about justice, the law is not an obstacle for achieving justice, but instead the necessary instrument through which justice can be forged. The central focus of Hegel’s distinctive natural law theory is on the law itself as we try to grasp its own internal morality and foster it. So Hegel’s theory avoids the problem of our being divided over which moral standard is best before we come to first consider the justice of a legal system. Hegel’s concern is with making the law pure, not with trying to work law into a purer image derived from outside it.

However, Hegel’s avoiding this problem exposes him to another. This is the risk of misidentifying the ‘right [ Recht ]’ within a legal system. If law is to be morally developed from within, this requires our being able to correctly discern its inner morality. But we must do so in the absence of an independent criterion to avoid only ‘finding’ in the law what we were looking for in advance.

This point can be illustrated by considering this process in practice. For Hegel, our knowledge about justice must focus on identifying ‘right [ Recht ]’ and not on our mere personal convictions. This is because following our personal convictions causes our understanding of right to become tainted (PR §309). No one person’s conviction of justice should prevail as we move toward a more communitarian, mutual recognition of the concept of right and its practical application in law (PR §§144, 260). This entails that judges should ensure that their personal views should not interfere with the content of their legal decision-making for fear that their decisions would be rendered ‘arbitrary [ Willkür ]’ (PR §211A). So courts should attempt to comprehend justice “in the particular case, without subjective feeling [ Empfindung ] of particular interest” (PR §219).

The issue is that there is no guarantee that our understanding of law accurately captures some important part of its internal morality waiting to be discovered, rather than one conjured from our imagination. Natural law internalism may represent a new understanding of natural law jurisprudence, but it suffers from an epistemological problem concerning our ability to identify correctly justice within the law.

This simple illustration of the obstacles any judge has in identifying the internal morality of law helps make the point about the problem Hegel’s theory runs into, but it is inaccurate in an important respect. Hegel gives the public a key role in the administration of justice within the state. He held this view throughout his career and it can be found in his early writings as well:

How blind are those who like to believe that institutions, constitutions and laws which no longer accord with men’s customs, needs, opinions and from which the spirit has departed, can continue to exist, or that forms in which feeling and understanding no longer have an interest are powerful enough to furnish a lasting bond for a nation [ eines Volkes ]. ( M, 2)

Our political and legal institutions lose some share of their moral legitimacy where they fail to accord with the community’s shared convictions about public justice. This legitimacy is not majoritarian, but has an ‘organic quality’ (PR §302R). It is key that any legal system is accessible to the public, but without the requirement of a majority vote. 23

This view of the public and public justice are at the heart of Hegel’s defense of the jury trial. 24 He says,

knowledge [ Kenntnis ] of right and of the course of court proceedings, as well as the ability to pursue one’s rights, may become the property of a class [ Stand ] which makes itself exclusive … by the terminology it uses, inasmuch as this terminology is a foreign language for those whose rights are at stake. (PR §228R)

Juries are important because they help ensure that individuals on trial are reasonably capable of understanding the proceedings and verdict. A defendant may well disagree with a jury’s decision, but he or she should be able to have some inkling about how the jury came to their view in the trial. This is because the defendant is much like his peers serving on the jury. The alternative is to leave the decision exclusively in the hands of the trained judge. Hegel finds this problematic because it can run the risk that the proceedings and verdict may be conducted in a way that is inaccessible to a defendant, especially one who lacks a legal background. In that case, legal justice would become disconnected from the community it serves. It is through letting the public decide judicial outcomes through the jury trial that the link between the community and its legal system are maintained.

Nonetheless, letting juries determine outcomes may secure this link, but maintaining a connection between the public and their legal system is not necessarily the same as correctly identifying the morality internal to a legal system that should help guide how decisions should be made. My concern is that the two can easily come apart: the community’s pursuit of its own sense of right may move in different directions than a pursuit following a view of right determined from careful examination of existing laws. Hegel seems to believe the two work in tandem, but this is unclear. Nor is it obvious that the community’s pursuit of its sense of justice is coherent, or that the current legal system of any state has within it a discoverable and coherent internal morality.

Throughout his writings, Hegel was deeply critical of England’s common law tradition. Hegel argues that a people’s ‘customary rights’ will at first ‘be characterized by formlessness , indeterminacy and incompleteness’ when they are initially collected and set out in a legal code (PR §211R). But then this legal code should progressively self-develop by making itself more explicit through codification. And yet England’s common law “is contained, as everyone knows” in an unwritten form: this is the cause of “enormous confusion which prevails in England” as “judges constantly act as legislators ” (PR §211R). This is because it is they who help set out what the law permits in particular cases.

But it is unclear how strongly Hegel should criticize the common law system—notwithstanding his explicit rejection of it. This is because his argument for trial by jury—which originated in common-law jurisdictions—supports the flexibility of the people, giving expression to their sense of right. Hegel claims the law is living and evolving as it develops a conception of actualized right—it is not fixed or set in stone and thus more fluid than the codified Roman law system prevalent in Germany then (as now). Hegel cannot both defend the case-by-case working out of right performed by jury trials while rejecting the case-by-case establishment of legal precedents by judges because the latter “retain a certain particularity” (PR §211A). 25 If working out how right can be understood concretely subject to revision and constant testing is how a people develop a more determinate sense of right, it is unclear why the common law cannot be used to achieve this end.

Hegel is also critical about the common law’s adversarial system. Here he is on more solid ground. Hegel says, “In the English legal system, it is left to the insight or arbitrary will of the prosecutor to categorize an act in terms of its specific criminal character (e.g. as murder or manslaughter), and the court cannot determine otherwise if it finds his conclusion incorrect” (PR §225R). In the adversarial system, prosecutors on behalf of the state determine which crime a defendant will be prosecuted for. They may be in error—and they might also engage in some brinkmanship, prosecuting someone for a lesser charge that might be more certain to lead to a conviction. This is different from the German system of Hegel’s time, where judges would lead courtroom deliberations, rather than lawyers for either side, without engaging in plea bargaining. This criticism does seem consistent with Hegel’s legal theorizing because our goal is to determine what is right, rather than easier or more efficient paths to finding others guilty of offenses—especially where they might actually have committed a more serious, but more difficult to prove, offense.

In sum, Hegel defends a novel understanding of natural law that appears to avoid the problem of disagreement about which moral standard should be determined first and then applied to our normative appraisal of law as common with natural law externalism. However, Hegel appears to trade one problem for another. This is because natural law internalism lacks any guarantee that what we claim is law’s internal morality is not our ‘finding’ a moral standard we had been looking for. 26

Moreover, Hegel claims that our discovering law’s internal morality is a decision that juries are well placed to make because the determination of the application of justice in a particular case is their public conception of justice. It is unclear that the community’s moral standard must be the same as law’s internal morality. If it were so, then we might discover law’s internal morality by looking more closely within ourselves without the need of looking within the law. This would render natural law internalism unstable, but we should recall that legal philosophy was not a major preoccupation for Hegel, despite his importance for the field. Hegel’s philosophical outline and associated lectures may not illuminate some clear way out of this problem, but he does provide us with a new way of thinking about natural law and how the public can and should relate to justice.

20.5. The Unified Theory of Punishment

Perhaps Hegel’s most significant and yet overlooked achievement is his identifying what we might call the unified theory of punishment . 27 In short, the unified theory is the view that punishment is neither retributive, nor a deterrent, nor rehabilitative; instead, it should be understood as bringing these different facets together. Thus punishment should not be seen as one or the other, but as some combination of all three. This section explains what is distinctive about Hegel’s theory of punishment as a further example of the innovativeness of his legal philosophy more generally.

Philosophers typically defend one of the three main theories of punishment: retribution, deterrence, or rehabilitation. Retribution is the most popular of the three. It is generally understood as the view that offenders should be punished to the degree that they deserve for some immoral activity. Murderers should be punished severely, according to retributivists, because they deserve it on account of their moral responsibility for such an evil act and in proportion to the wrongfulness of their crime.

Retributivists have traditionally accepted a ‘principle of equality’ whereby an offender’s punishment is proportionate to the corresponding crime. 28 This principle does not necessarily entail an eye for an eye, although some retributivists make statements in that direction. 29 Instead, it is usually a claim about comparative values: that the value of the criminal wrong should be proportionally equivalent to the severity of punishment. For example, if someone has performed an especially grave crime like murder, punishing it with an equality of value need not require the death penalty, although that is one possibility. But what is key—for the retribution as equivalence of value view—is that capital punishment would be justified not as an eye for an eye, but punishing a very serious crime with a very serious punishment. That murderers would be punished by death is more a coincidence than a requirement. 30

Hegel is widely thought to support retributivism. 31 This common interpretation is not without some support in the Philosophy of Right . Hegel says that crime should be understood as an infringement of “the existence [ Dasein ] of freedom in its concrete sense—i.e. to infringe right as right” (PR §95R). It is the infringement of right, of justice, that is wrongful about crime. This requires a ‘restoration of right’ through punishment to reassert right’s existence and confirm its importance (PR §99). Hegel calls this ‘ retribution ’ with the important qualification of “in so far as [retribution], by its concept, is an infringement of an infringement” (PR §101). This means that crime is a violation of right because it attempts to negate it. In response, we should negate this negation: a crime is an attempt to violate our rights, and so punishment is an effort to undo this wrongful activity. Punishment is not to be a specific equality of like for like, but rather ‘an approximate fulfillment’ in value (PR §101R).

But this view of Hegel as a retributivist is flawed. One reason is that retribution presumes an account of moral responsibility and a legal system. We punish offenders because they have broken a law. However, Hegel’s discussion here is in the section “Abstract Right,” which is philosophically prior to the state and legal system. His claims about restoring right are specifically addressing the contractual stipulations arising through mutual recognition between self and other, not the more complex legal relationships that citizens develop over time in the state. There are no laws, no police, no courts, and no prisons at this point in his discussion. This is not to say his claims about crime as a violation of right where punishment aims to restore rights is meaningless. It is rather a foundational claim about the ground of punishment that helps structure his more complete theory of punishment that develops beyond “Abstract Right.”

There are already strong indications that Hegel’s theory of punishment departs from standard accounts of retribution, even in “Abstract Right.” When discussing ‘ retribution ’ with the important qualification already flagged in the preceding that by this he means “an infringement of an infringement” understood as a restoration of rights, Hegel says, “It is not the crimes or punishments which change, but the relation between the two” (PR §96A).

This is crucial because retributivists generally accept a fixed relation between crime and punishment: the moral wrongness of one is linked to the other, and this is a relationship that should not change if background conditions were different. Typically, retributivists like Kant were opposed to consequentialism, and so context should not factor into which punishment an offender deserves. But Hegel’s first break with retributivists is that he accepts that context matters. Crimes may be public wrongs irrespective of circumstances, but they can make a difference in determining punishment.

Hegel’s second break with retributivists is more explicit: he rejects the idea that punishment is no more than retribution. In a rarely quoted passage from his Science of Logic , he says,

Punishment , for instance, has a variety of determinations: that it is retribution; and also a deterrent example, a deterring threat made by the law; and also a contribution to the self-awareness and betterment of the culprit. Each of these different determinations has been regarded as the ground of punishment , on the ground that it is the essential determination, and by default the others, since they are different from it, have been regarded as only accidental. But the one determination which is assumed as ground does not amount to the whole punishment. (SL 11.310/405–406)

These comments are crucial to understanding Hegel’s theory of punishment. 32 They make clear that he does not believe we must choose to defend retributivism, deterrence, or rehabilitation. Instead, each is a part of what punishment is about. The ground of punishment is retributivist insofar as an offender must deserve punishment for it to be justified. But the purpose of punishment as a restoration of right can take different forms, including as a deterrent or rehabilitative project, if that serves that aim.

This passage is also not the only place where Hegel makes such remarks. In his Natural Law essay, he argues,

in the case of punishment, one determinacy is seized upon—be it the moral improvement of the criminal, the damage caused, the awareness of the punishment before the crime was committed, or the need to give this awareness reality by carrying out the threat, etc.—and the detail in question is made the end and essence of the whole. It naturally follows that, since this determinacy has no necessary connection with the other determinacies which can also be brought to light and distinguished, endless agonising takes place to discover their necessary relationship or the dominance of one over the others. (NL 4.421–422/107)

This is a critique of our taking only one particular aspect about punishment as the punishment to the exclusion of others. Punishment is not one instead of another. Nonetheless, this thought is not obvious because different theories about punishment appear to clash at first glance. What an offender deserves may justify a very different punishment from what might best deter, for example.

This leaves open the question about how punishment might bring together retribution, deterrence, and rehabilitation into a unified, coherent theory. While his comments indicate this is his position, he is less clear about the specific shape this should take. This is perhaps partly due to the fact that his comments on punishment are almost entirely in outline and require fleshing out.

Hegel leaves us some important clues. In the Philosophy of Right , he says,

an injury to one member of society is an injury to all the others does not alter the nature of crime in terms of its concept, but in terms of its outward existence … its danger to civil society is a determination of its magnitude … This quality or magnitude varies, however, according to the condition of civil society. (PR §218R)

The nature of crime at a conceptual level is unchanged under different circumstances. In other words, murder and theft remain wrongful because they violate right and this is unaffected by context. It is in this sense that the ground is retributivist: all crimes are varieties of wrong at their heart.

But context matters for setting the relationship between crime and punishment. Hegel is explicit: “it is not the crimes or punishments themselves which change, but the relation between the two” (PR §96A). For example, the more that civil society is threatened by crime, the more severely it will seek to punish it. So for Hegel crimes can be punished more or less severely over time because they are seen as more or less of a threat to society. Examples he gives includes times of war or civil unrest (PR §218A). Crimes will be punished less severely during peacetime than during a war, not because the crime is conceptually different, but because we require a greater effort at restoring rights at such a time of conflict. Indeed, Hegel argues that as a state becomes more secure, we should expect the death penalty to “become less frequent, as indeed this ultimate form of punishment deserves to be” (PR §100A).

The important point is that this is no retributivist view: context can greatly influence penal severity, with circumstances influencing how problematic crimes are for society. Our individual desert for some action in the past might inform whether we have committed an offense. But it does not—by itself alone—determine how we should be punished. This is starkly different from traditional retributivist views whereby it matters only what someone deserves when punishing him, not whether it makes a society happier or more secure. Yet for Hegel the stability of society and its sense of self is a key factor in setting the severity—and perhaps even setting the criminal law. 33

This leaves much to the imagination about how retribution, deterrence, and rehabilitation might work together to act as a restoration of rights. There is some indication offered by the British Idealists, sometimes called the British Hegelians. These figures, including T. H. Green, F. H. Bradley, and others, were heavily influenced by Hegel’s philosophy, and most defend a similar view of punishment where retributivist, deterrent, and rehabilitative features are combined into a unified theory of punishment. This may not be an accidental coincidence given the strong influence of Hegel’s philosophy, not least his Logic , on their work.

The British Idealists help us spell out a bit more how a unified theory of punishment might work. 34 The Idealist T. H. Green says, “the justice of the punishment depends on the justice of the general system of rights” and “the proper and direct object of state-punishment [is] … the general protection of rights.” 35 Punishment is about societal maintenance through the protection of rights. Crimes are rights violations that threaten the community and require a response to restore the public recognition of rights possessed by individuals.

This is spelled out further by the Idealist James Seth:

This view of the object of punishment gives the true measure of its amount. This is found not in the amount of moral depravity which the crime reveals, but in the importance of the right violated, relatively to the system of rights of which it forms a part … The measure of the punishment is, in short, the measure of social necessity; and this measure is a changing one. 36

We punish crimes because they are violations of our rights, and these rights should be restored through punishment. All crimes are rights violations, but some rights are more central than others and so require more punishment. Theft may violate my property rights and murder my right to life, but murder is more significant because violating this right ends any possibility of my enjoying this or any other right.

These perspectives flesh out a bit more what a unified theory of punishment might look like. Punishment must be deserved and its amount would vary depending on what would be required to maintain and protect a system of rights. This could warrant more deterrent punishments in some circumstances and more rehabilitative elements in others. Any clash between competing principles is governed by an overarching purpose of rights protection.

This still leaves much more to be worked out and does not speak directly to individual cases. But it should be clear that Hegel has once again done something remarkable. He has offered us new insights into the nature of punishment and the possibility of a novel alternative, the unified theory of punishment.

20.6. Conclusion

This chapter has provided a survey of some key ideas in Hegel’s philosophy of law. There is some debate about which jurisprudential school of thought best relates to his legal theory, although most commentators view it as an unexceptional natural law theory. But this is untrue. Hegel’s philosophy of law uniquely creates a new distinction in the natural law tradition between natural law externalism and natural law internalism. The former represents most natural lawyers and it is the view that we are to determine a moral standard first and then apply it to the law to assess its overall justice. Hegel defends the latter and claims the moral standard we should use to assess the justice of a legal system is located internally to it. We look to the law first and ascertain its moral development from within.

This perspective is not without its problems. It is unclear how we can be sure that the moral standards we discover are not read into our interpretation of law’s internal morality from outside. Nor is it clear how Hegel’s clear support for the public having a say on matters of public justice, such as through the jury trial, can perform the task of developing the internal morality of law. But Hegel nonetheless provides us with a new understanding of the natural law tradition that has escaped his predecessors and offers an important, and to my mind convincing, defense of the jury trial.

Hegel presents us with an innovative theory of punishment. Instead of the traditional view that penal theorists must choose between defending retribution, deterrence, or rehabilitation, Hegel claims that punishment is not one of them, but all in combination. This opens his claim to the charge that these different theories clash with each other. But the key to unlocking this problem that was uncovered by the British Idealists inspired by Hegel’s work in the late nineteenth century was that these three can be brought together under a new framework of societal maintenance through rights protection—an analysis that is consistent with Hegel’s comments about punishment across his work. This has real contemporary importance because countries like the United States and the United Kingdom use sentencing guidelines that bring together retributivist, deterrent, and rehabilitative elements without a framework for employing them coherently. Hegel is the first to substantively contribute to the idea of the unified theory of punishment, and this offers a promising perspective for rendering more coherent the sentencing guidelines in force throughout many countries today.

Overall, these are remarkable achievements for a philosopher who was not trained in law and did not set out to be a philosopher of law per se. Hegel’s work continues to inspire us with its rich insights into how we can better understand past thinking about key issues that still reap rewards for us today. 37

Works Cited

Primary texts.

Hegel, G. W. F.   Elements of the Philosophy of Right [PR], translated by H. B. Nisbet , edited by Allen Wood . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991 .

Hegel, G. W. F.   Lectures on Natural Right and Political Science: The First Philosophy of Right: Heidelberg, 1817–18, with additions from the lectures of 1818–19 [LNR], translated by J. Michael Stewart and Peter C. Hodgson . Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995 .

Hegel, G. W. F. “On the Scientific Ways of Treating Natural Law, on Its Place in Practical Philosophy, and Its Relation to the Positive Sciences of Right [NL],” in Political Writings , edited by Laurence Dickey and H. B. Nisbet . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999 , 102–180.

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Hegel, G. W. F. “The German Constitution [GC],” in Political Writings , edited by Laurence Dickey and H. B. Nisbet . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999 , 6–101.

Hegel, G. W. F. “The Magistrates Should Be Elected by the People [M],” in Political Writings , edited by Laurence Dickey and H. B. Nisbet . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999 , 1–5.

Hegel, G. W. F.   The Philosophy of History [PH], translated by J. Sibree . New York: Dover, 1956 .

Hegel, G. W. F.   The Science of Logic [SL]. Translated and edited by George di Giovanni . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010 .

Hegel, G. W. F.   Vorlesungen über Naturrecht und Staatswissenschaft, Hegelberg 1817/18 (vol. 1 of G.W.F. Hegel: Vorlesungen: Ausgewählte Nachschriften und Manuskripte ), edited by C. Becker , W. Bonsiepen , A. Gethmann-Siefert , F. Hogemann , W. Jaeschke , Ch. Jamme , H. Ch. Lucas , K. R. Meist , and H. Schneider , with an introduction by O. Pöggeler . Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 1983 .

Kant, Immanuel.   The Metaphysics of Morals [MM]. Translated and edited by Mary Gregor. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996 .

Secondary Literature

Bix, Brian. “Natural Law Theory,” in A Companion to Philosophy of Law and Legal Theory , edited by Dennis Patterson . Oxford: Blackwell, 1996 , 223–240.

Brod, Harry.   Hegel’s Philosophy of Politics: Idealism, Identity and Modernity . Boulder, CO: Westview, 1992 .

Brooks, Thom. “ Between Natural Law and Legal Positivism: Dworkin and Hegel on Legal Theory. ” Georgia State University Law University 23 ( 2007 ): 513–560.

Brooks, Thom. “Hegel and the Unified Theory of Punishment,” in Thom Brooks (ed.), Hegel’s Philosophy of Right . Oxford: Blackwell, 2012 , 105–123.

Brooks, Thom. “ Hegel’s Ambiguous Contribution to Legal Theory. ” Res Publica 11 ( 2005 ): 85–94.

Brooks, Thom.   Hegel’s Political Philosophy: A Systematic Reading of the Philosophy of Right , 2nd ed. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013 .

Brooks. Thom. “ Is Bradley a Retributivist? ” History of Political Thought 32 ( 2011 ): 83–95.

Brooks, Thom. “ James Seth on Natural Law and Legal Theory. ” Collingwood and British Idealism Studies 12 ( 2012 ): 115–132.

Brooks, Thom. “ Kant’s Theory of Punishment. ” Utilitas 15 ( 2003 ): 206–224.

Brooks, Thom. “ Legal Positivism and Faith in Law. ” Modern Law Review 77 ( 2014 ): 139–147.

Brooks, Thom. “Natural Law Internalism,” in Thom Brooks (ed.), Hegel’s Philosophy of Right . Oxford: Blackwell, 2012 , 167–179.

Brooks, Thom. “ On F. H. Bradley’s ‘Some Remarks on Punishment.’ ” Ethics 125 ( 2014 ): 223–225.

Brooks, Thom.   Punishment . New York: Routledge, 2012 .

Brooks, Thom. “Punishment and British Idealism,” in Punishment and Ethics: New Perspectives , edited by Jesper Ryberg and J. Angelo Corlett . Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010 , 16–32.

Brooks, Thom. “ T. H. Green’s Theory of Punishment. ” History of Political Thought 24 ( 2003 ): 685–701.

Brooks, Thom. “ The Right to Trial by Jury. ” Journal of Applied Philosophy 21 ( 2004 ): 197–212.

Brooks, Thom (ed.) Hegel’s Philosophy of Right . Oxford: Blackwell, 2012 .

Brooks, Thom (ed.). The Right to a Fair Trial . Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2009 .

Brown v. Board of Education . 347 U.S. 483 (1954).

Burns, Tony.   Natural Law and Political Ideology in the Philosophy of Hegel . Aldershot, UK: Avebury, 1996 .

Cooper, David E. “Hegel’s Theory of Punishment,” in Hegel’s Political Philosophy: Problems and Perspectives , edited by Z. A. Pelczynski . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971 , 151–167.

Curzon, L. B.   Jurisprudence , 3rd ed. London: Cavendish, 1996 .

del Vecchio, Giorgio.   Philosophy of Law , 8th ed. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1952 .

Dias, R. W. M.   Jurisprudence , 5th ed. London: Butterworths, 1985 .

Douzinas, Costas. “ Identity, Recognition, Rights or What Can Hegel Teach Us about Human Rights? ” Journal of Law and Society 29 ( 2002 ): 379–405.

Findlay, J. N.   Hegel: A Re-examination . London: George Allen & Unwin, 1958 .

Finnis, John.   Natural Law and Natural Rights . Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980 .

Franco, Paul.   Hegel’s Philosophy of Freedom . New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002 .

Freeman, M. D. A. (ed.). Lloyd’s Introduction to Jurisprudence , 6th ed. London: Sweet and Maxwell, 1994 .

Fuller, Lon L.   The Morality of Law , revised ed. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1969 .

Green, T. H.   Lectures on the Principles of Political Obligation . London: Longmans, Green, 1941 .

Hart, H. L. A.   The Concept of Law , 2nd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994 .

Hoffheimer, Michael H. “ Hegel’s First Philosophy of Law. ” Tennessee Law Review 62 ( 1995 ): 823–874.

Inwood, Michael.   A Hegel Dictionary . Oxford: Blackwell, 1992 .

Knowles, Dudley.   Hegel and the Philosophy of Right . London: Routledge, 2002 .

Kramer, Matthew H.   In Defense of Legal Positivism: Law Without Trimmings . Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003 .

Paton, George Whitecross.   A Textbook of Jurisprudence , 4th ed. Oxford: Clarendon, 1972 .

Pinkard, Terry. “Constitutionalism, Politics and the Common Life,” in Hegel Reconsidered: Beyond Metaphysics and the Authoritarian State , edited by H. Tristam Engelhardt, Jr. , and Terry Pinkard . Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1994 , 163–186.

Popper, Karl.   The Open Society and Its Enemies , Vol. 2: Hegel and Marx . London: Routledge, 2002 .

Primoratz, Igor.   Justifying Legal Punishment . Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1989 .

Rommen, H. A. “In Defense of Natural Law,” in Law and Philosophy , edited by Sidney Hook . New York: New York University Press, 1964 , 105–121.

Salter, Michael , and Julia A. Shaw . “ Towards a Critical Theory of Constitutional Law: Hegel’s Contribution. ” Journal of Law and Society 21 ( 1994 ): 464–486.

Seth, James.   A Study of Ethical Principles , 9th ed. Edinburgh: William Blackwood & Sons, 1907 .

Stern, Robert. “MacIntyre and Historicism,” in After MacIntyre: Critical Perspectives on the World of Alasdair MacIntyre , edited by John Horton and Susan Mendus . Cambridge: Polity, 1994 , 146–160.

Stillman, Peter G. “ Hegel’s Idea of Punishment. ” Journal of the History of Philosophy 14 ( 1976 ): 169–182.

Thompson, Kevin. “Institutional Normativity,” in Beyond Liberalism and Communitarianism , edited by Robert R. Williams . Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001 , 41–65.

Weinrib, Ernest J. “Legal Formalism,” in A Companion to Philosophy of Law and Legal Theory , edited by Dennis Patterson . Oxford: Blackwell, 1996 , 332–342.

Wood, Allen W.   Hegel’s Ethical Thought . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990 .

See Paul Franco, Hegel’s Philosophy of Freedom ; and Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies .

Bix, “Natural Law Theory,” 224.

See Brooks, “Natural Law Internalism,” 167–169.

Hart, The Concept of Law , 186.

See Finnis, Natural Law and Natural Rights , 85–90.

Finnis, Natural Law and Natural Rights , 97.

See Fuller, The Morality of Law , 42.

Fuller, The Morality of Law , 39–49.

Fuller, The Morality of Law , 42.

Fuller, The Morality of Law , 39.

Fuller, The Morality of Law , 45.

See Fuller, The Morality of Law , 33–39.

Fuller, The Morality of Law , 97.

See Brod, Hegel’s Philosophy of Politics , 38, 79; Burns, Natural Law and Political Ideology in the Philosophy of Hegel ; Knowles, Hegel and the Philosophy of Right , 128; Paton, A Textbook of Jurisprudence , 114–115; Pinkard, “Constitutionalism, Politics and the Common Life,” 177; Rommen, “In Defense of Natural Law,” 116; Thompson, “Institutional Normativity,” 42; and Weinrib, “Legal Formalism,” 338.

See Brooks, “Hegel’s Ambiguous Contribution to Legal Theory,” 85–94; Curzon, Jurisprudence , 179, 212; del Vecchio, Philosophy of Law , 123, 125–129; Dias, Jurisprudence , 384–385; Douzinas, “Identity, Recognition, Rights or What Can Hegel Teach Us about Human Rights?,” 379–405; Freeman (ed.), Lloyd’s Introduction to Jurisprudence , 783–785; Hoffheimer, “Hegel’s First Philosophy of Law,” 823–874; Paton, A Textbook of Jurisprudence , 114–115; and Salter and Shaw, “Towards a Critical Theory of Constitutional Law: Hegel’s Contribution,” 464–486.

See Brooks, 225; Brooks, “Between Natural Law and Legal Positivism: Dworkin and Hegel on Legal Theory,” 513–560; and Brooks, “Natural Law Internalism,” 167–179.

See Hart, The Concept of Law ; and Kramer, In Defense of Legal Positivism

This is a widely held view among the general public, but it is not commonly shared by most legal philosophers. While natural lawyers traditionally have dominated jurisprudence, legal positivism and legal realism are more popular among contemporary legal philosophers. This is not to say positivists and realists are unconcerned about injustice, but rather to draw attention to the fact that they share a different view about the importance and the place of morality in studying law.

Robert Stern, “MacIntyre and Historicism,” 151.

See Brown v. Board of Education , 347 U.S. 483 (1954).

See Brooks, “History,” 148–157.

See Kant, The Metaphysics of Morals .

This raises some interesting parallels with Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s political and legal philosophy. Rousseau was similarly concerned that true freedom—understood as the General Will—shaped the development of our laws and political institutions, rather than arbitrary decisions. The General Will is a similar core connection between citizens in a political community that work out in a deliberative way their shared view of justice. This is subject to constant revision over time. While Rousseau’s thought is very different from Hegel’s, it is likely these ideas had some influence on Hegel’s thinking given his knowledge of and interest in Rousseau’s writings. See Brooks (ed.), Rousseau and Law .

See Brooks, “The Right to Trial by Jury,” 197–212; and Brooks (ed.), The Right to a Fair Trial .

Part of Hegel’s concern with common law trials is their creating case law. He appears to favor working out a legal system through a legislative process than through the courts. This might be explained by his nineteenth-century German view of the judiciary as a part of the executive branch: both the police and the judge apply universal laws to particular cases. A concern for Hegel is that he does not appear to accept that the finding in one case can be applied to another when determining justice. Instead, he seems to hold that we should remain transfixed on right [ Recht ] and not become distracted by how it may be thought established in particular cases. But this seems untenable for Hegel because common law precedents hold as ratio —what counts is not the particular facts per se, but the legal principles and distinctions that are worked out by courts over time and that are subject to constant revision. This again suggests that Hegel’s stated opposition to English common law is perhaps misplaced—or at least underdeveloped. I am grateful to a Cara Cummings, graduate student in Dean Moyar’s graduate class on Hegel’s Philosophy of Right when I was a guest speaker at Johns Hopkins, for raising this illuminating issue.

I have elsewhere argued that Hegel uniquely shares some core similarities with Dworkin’s legal theory. Both apply a self-developing moral standard arising from within a community’s shared sense of justice and right—they are both examples of natural law internalists. See Brooks, “Between Natural Law and Legal Positivism: Dworkin and Hegel on Legal Theory.”

See Brooks, “Hegel and the Unified Theory of Punishment.”

This phrase is taken from Kant. See Kant, MM 6:332.

See Kant, MM 6:332: “whatever undeserved evil you inflict upon another within the people, that you inflict upon yourself. If you insult him, you insult yourself; if you steal from him, you steal from yourself; if you strike him, you strike yourself; if you kill him, you kill yourself.” See Brooks, “Kant’s Theory of Punishment.”

I am grateful to Brian O’Connor for first highlighting this distinction to me.

Cooper, “Hegel’s Theory of Punishment” ; Findlay, Hegel: A Re-examination , 312–313; Inwood, A Hegel Dictionary , 232–235; Primoratz, Justifying Legal Punishment , 69–81; Stillman, “Hegel’s Idea of Punishment” ; and Wood, Hegel’s Ethical Thought , 108–124.

Philosophers who want to deny the importance of this passage must argue either that the Philosophy of Right ’s discussion of punishment is incompatible with this explicit example from The Science of Logic —a text which Hegel clearly states several times informs and underpins the arguments of the Philosophy of Right —or that Hegel’s example in the Science of Logic is inconsistent with his theorizing on grounds (and so must be incompatible with the Philosophy of Right on grounds of a false illustration of his Logic ). It continues to surprise me that no other interpreter has picked up on this important passage, or even acknowledged it. I continue to be highly suspicious of counterarguments about Hegel’s theory of punishment claiming it is some version of retributivism where they fail to acknowledge passages like this that so explicitly state that was not his view.

If society felt no threat by the performance of certain actions, then what might have once been crimes might begin to lose their criminal character. For example, witchcraft might have been seen as a serious threat to the community and punished accordingly. But where it loses that character, its punishment evaporates until there may be no reason to think it a crime, as it would not warrant punishment.

See Brooks, “Punishment and British Idealism” ; Brooks, “Is Bradley a Retributivist?” ; and Brooks, “On F. H. Bradley’s ‘Some Remarks on Punishment’ ” , 223–225.

Green, Lectures on the Principles of Political Obligation , §§189, 204.

James Seth, A Study of Ethical Principles , 305. See Brooks, “James Seth on Natural Law and Legal Theory.”

I am very grateful for comments by Dean Moyar and from students in his graduate seminar studying Hegel’s Philosophy of Right . I further benefited from discussions about Hegel’s legal theory with Chris Bennett, John Gardner, Stephen Houlgate, Dudley Knowles, Matthew Kramer, Peter Nicholson, Brian O’Connor, Bhikhu Parekh, Michael Rosen, Avital Simhony, Robert Stern, and Allen Wood.

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Essays in Legal Philosophy: Exploring the Foundations of Law

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A Phenomenological Approach to Legal Epistemic Injustice

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Injustices in legal contexts are widespread, yet we usually tend to think of them through a social lens. The study of epistemic injustices increases the resolution of this lens; it identifies how we wrong others as "knowers." In this paper, I propose that the tradition of phenomenology may be invoked to describe and identify instances of epistemic injustice in legal contexts. In order to justify this claim, I establish a phenomenological methodology predicated on the synthesis of two ideas: (1) the phenomenological recognition of the Other, and (2) society's duty to endow its members with an epistemic sphere of action.

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The Connection Between Law and Morality

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Philosophy of Law Research Paper Topics

This page delves into an array of philosophy of law research paper topics , offering students a comprehensive guide to deepening their understanding and fostering insightful academic discussions in the realm of legal philosophy. As the interplay between law and philosophical principles has evolved over centuries, the importance of selecting a compelling research topic in this field cannot be understated. From exploring historical jurisprudential theories to contemporary legal debates, students will find a rich tapestry of ideas and themes to explore, which not only enhance academic prowess but also provide a more profound understanding of the complex relationship between law and philosophy. Whether you’re a novice to the subject or looking to refine your research focus, this guide serves as an invaluable resource for your academic journey in the philosophy of law.

100 Philosophy of Law Research Paper Topics

The philosophy of law, often known as jurisprudence, stands as a testament to humanity’s continuous endeavor to comprehend, critique, and reformulate legal systems. As legal structures touch every aspect of human existence, from human rights to commerce, understanding the philosophical underpinnings becomes crucial. The burgeoning interest in the philosophy of law indicates the profound connection between foundational legal principles and societal frameworks. Thus, students’ careful selection of philosophy of law research paper topics not only drives academic growth but also contributes significantly to a deeper understanding of the law’s spirit and purpose.

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• Early legal thought: From Hammurabi’s Code to the Twelve Tables of Rome.
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• The indeterminacy of legal texts.
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• Common law vs. civil law: Philosophical differences.
• The philosophy behind Islamic law.
• Confucianism and its impact on East Asian legal systems.
• African customary law and its philosophical foundations.
• Indigenous legal systems and their worldview.
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• The philosophy of restorative justice in traditional societies.
• The intertwining of religion and law: Case studies.
• Legal pluralism in multicultural societies.
• The challenges and advantages of legal transplants.

The philosophy of law extends far beyond theoretical discussions, reflecting society’s moral compass, ethical dilemmas, and societal values. By delving deep into philosophy of law research paper topics, students and scholars pave the way for richer debates, innovative solutions, and a nuanced understanding of the legal systems that govern our lives. Such academic inquiries not only deepen our comprehension of jurisprudential foundations but also reinforce the law’s role as an ever-evolving instrument of justice, order, and societal well-being.

In a world marked by an intricate web of legal systems, understanding the philosophical bedrock of these structures is imperative. The topics highlighted above, spanning historical timelines to cutting-edge issues, provide a testament to the dynamic and evolving nature of the philosophy of law. Tapping into these philosophy of law research paper topics equips scholars with the tools to dissect, critique, and reshape legal concepts, fostering not just academic growth but a broader appreciation of law’s pivotal role in shaping civilizations.

The Range of Philosophy of Law Research Paper Topics

Introduction The philosophy of law , or jurisprudence, has long been revered as the backbone of legal systems, acting as the intricate tapestry weaving together moral, social, and political threads. These foundations guide the establishment, interpretation, and execution of laws that govern societies worldwide. As legal realms become more complex in our dynamically evolving societies, delving deep into the philosophy of law research paper topics remains pivotal for understanding, critiquing, and refining the very systems that seek to uphold justice.

Deep Exploration of Topics in the Realm of Philosophy of Law At its core, the philosophy of law seeks to answer some of the most profound questions regarding law: What is law? What are its origins? What should it aspire to achieve? Is law necessarily moral or just a system of rules irrespective of morality? Such fundamental inquiries have birthed a multitude of subtopics and debates, each brimming with its own nuances and intricacies. These include the debates between natural law theorists and legal positivists, the critiques presented by critical legal studies, and the feminist perspectives on jurisprudence.

Tracing the Historical Journey of Legal Philosophies Historically, legal thought has evolved alongside humanity’s progression. From the earliest codified laws like Hammurabi’s Code to the sophisticated international treaties of today, philosophical underpinnings have been ever-present. Ancient philosophers such as Plato and Aristotle laid foundational thoughts, with the former envisioning an ideal state in his “Republic” and the latter dissecting justice and equity in his works. Fast forward to the Enlightenment, thinkers like John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Immanuel Kant began to challenge the status quo, presenting ideas that shaped modern democracies and constitutional governance.

In the 19th and 20th centuries, legal realism, positivism, and interpretivism rose to prominence. These movements, championed by thinkers like Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., H.L.A. Hart, and Ronald Dworkin respectively, further nuanced our understanding of the law’s nature and its relationship with morality and society. The critical legal studies movement later emerged as a counter to traditional legal thought, offering critiques from socio-political perspectives.

How the Philosophy of Law has Influenced Different Legal Systems Worldwide The world boasts a tapestry of legal systems—each with its philosophical basis. For instance, the Common Law system, predominant in countries like the UK and the US, has been largely influenced by legal realist thought, emphasizing judicial decisions as a primary source of law. Conversely, the Civil Law system, common in many European nations, leans on codified laws, reflecting Enlightenment thinkers’ aspirations.

Islamic law or Sharia, foundational in many Middle Eastern countries, draws its tenets from religious scriptures, intertwining divine commands with jurisprudential interpretations. Similarly, in nations like China, a mix of socialist legal theory, traditional Confucian thought, and modern legal principles informs the legal landscape.

Moreover, as globalization accelerates, international law has gained prominence, requiring a blending of different legal philosophies to cater to diverse nations and cultures under treaties and agreements. The philosophy of law plays a vital role in bridging these divides, ensuring mutual respect, understanding, and cooperation.

The Importance of Choosing Appropriate Philosophy of Law Research Paper Topics For scholars and students, the selection of a research topic isn’t merely a procedural step but a commitment to exploring, questioning, and contributing to jurisprudential thought. A well-chosen topic fosters academic growth, encourages innovative thinking, and can potentially reshape prevailing legal paradigms.

Given the vastness of the philosophy of law, research topics should ideally resonate with contemporary challenges, historical significance, or potential future shifts. Whether investigating the ethical implications of AI in legal systems, dissecting the philosophy behind international human rights, or exploring indigenous perspectives on justice, a profound research question can lead to insights beneficial for academia and practical legal realms alike.

Conclusion As societies continue to morph, so does the law and its underlying philosophies. The philosophy of law research paper topics offers scholars a vast, rich, and ever-evolving field of inquiry. From the debates of ancient Greece to the modern-day challenges posed by technology and globalization, the philosophy of law remains an indispensable compass guiding legal thought and practice. Through rigorous academic exploration, the next wave of philosophers, lawyers, and scholars stand poised to shape the future of legal systems, ensuring they serve as beacons of justice, fairness, and societal harmony.

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Russia's Nuclear Deterrent Command Center Imperiled by Winter Freeze—Report

A Russian nuclear deterrent command center in Moscow has been imperiled by power outages that have impacted more than one-quarter of the region's cities amid freezing temperatures, a Russian Telegram channel has reported.

The VChK-OGPU outlet, which purports to have inside information from Russian security forces, reported that the 820th Main Center for Missile Attack Warnings—part of the Russian Space Forces, a branch of the country's Aerospace Forces—near Solnechnogorsk in Moscow is without power.

It serves as the space forces early warning network against potential ballistic missile attacks.

The development comes as Russians are reported to be suffering from power outages in their homes in the Moscow region caused by technical issues at plants amid subzero temperatures.

On January 4, a heating main burst at the Klimovsk Specialized Ammunition Plant in the town of Podolsk, which is about 30 miles south of central Moscow. Since then, tens of thousands of Russians are reported to have no heating in their homes.

Affected areas include the cities of Khimki, Balashikha, Lobnya, Lyubertsy, Podolsk, Chekhov and Naro-Fominsk, a map published by a Russian Telegram channel and shared on other social media sites shows.

Other Russian media outlets reported that in Moscow, residents of Balashikha, Elektrostal, Solnechnogorsk, Dmitrov, Domodedovo, Troitsk, Taldom, Orekhovo-Zuyevo, Krasnogorsk, Pushkino, Ramenskoye, Voskresensk, Losino-Petrovsky and Selyatino are also without power.

The Telegram channel said that at the 820th Main Center for Missile Attack Warnings, "the crew...is on duty around the clock."

"It is here that the decision on a retaliatory nuclear strike is executed," the channel said.

Newsweek could not independently verify the report and has reached out to the Russian Defense Ministry by email for comment.

Power outages have also been reported in Russia's second-largest city, St. Petersburg, in the country's western Voronezh region, in the southwest city of Volgograd, and in Rostov, which borders Ukraine, a country that Russia has been at war with since February 24, 2022.

On Sunday, two shopping malls in St. Petersburg were forced to close because of problems with light and heating, reported local news outlet 78.ru. Hundreds of other homes in the city have had no electricity, water or heating for days amid temperatures of -25 C (-13 F).

Russian authorities have also been forced to compensate passengers of a train that ran from Samara to St. Petersburg (a 20-hour journey) without heating during -30 C (-22 F) temperatures. Videos circulating on social media showed carriage windows frozen over. A passenger also said the toilet didn't work during the trip because of frozen pipes.

Do you have a tip on a world news story that Newsweek should be covering? Do you have a question about the Russia-Ukraine war? Let us know via [email protected].

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40 facts about elektrostal.

Written by Lanette Mayes

Modified & Updated: 02 Mar 2024

Reviewed by Jessica Corbett

Elektrostal is a vibrant city located in the Moscow Oblast region of Russia. With a rich history, stunning architecture, and a thriving community, Elektrostal is a city that has much to offer. Whether you are a history buff, nature enthusiast, or simply curious about different cultures, Elektrostal is sure to captivate you.

This article will provide you with 40 fascinating facts about Elektrostal, giving you a better understanding of why this city is worth exploring. From its origins as an industrial hub to its modern-day charm, we will delve into the various aspects that make Elektrostal a unique and must-visit destination.

So, join us as we uncover the hidden treasures of Elektrostal and discover what makes this city a true gem in the heart of Russia.

Key Takeaways:

• Elektrostal, known as the “Motor City of Russia,” is a vibrant and growing city with a rich industrial history, offering diverse cultural experiences and a strong commitment to environmental sustainability.
• With its convenient location near Moscow, Elektrostal provides a picturesque landscape, vibrant nightlife, and a range of recreational activities, making it an ideal destination for residents and visitors alike.

Known as the “Motor City of Russia.”

Elektrostal, a city located in the Moscow Oblast region of Russia, earned the nickname “Motor City” due to its significant involvement in the automotive industry.

Home to the Elektrostal Metallurgical Plant.

Elektrostal is renowned for its metallurgical plant, which has been producing high-quality steel and alloys since its establishment in 1916.

Boasts a rich industrial heritage.

Elektrostal has a long history of industrial development, contributing to the growth and progress of the region.

Founded in 1916.

The city of Elektrostal was founded in 1916 as a result of the construction of the Elektrostal Metallurgical Plant.

Located approximately 50 kilometers east of Moscow.

Elektrostal is situated in close proximity to the Russian capital, making it easily accessible for both residents and visitors.

Known for its vibrant cultural scene.

Elektrostal is home to several cultural institutions, including museums, theaters, and art galleries that showcase the city’s rich artistic heritage.

A popular destination for nature lovers.

Surrounded by picturesque landscapes and forests, Elektrostal offers ample opportunities for outdoor activities such as hiking, camping, and birdwatching.

Hosts the annual Elektrostal City Day celebrations.

Every year, Elektrostal organizes festive events and activities to celebrate its founding, bringing together residents and visitors in a spirit of unity and joy.

Has a population of approximately 160,000 people.

Elektrostal is home to a diverse and vibrant community of around 160,000 residents, contributing to its dynamic atmosphere.

Boasts excellent education facilities.

The city is known for its well-established educational institutions, providing quality education to students of all ages.

A center for scientific research and innovation.

Elektrostal serves as an important hub for scientific research, particularly in the fields of metallurgy, materials science, and engineering.

Surrounded by picturesque lakes.

The city is blessed with numerous beautiful lakes, offering scenic views and recreational opportunities for locals and visitors alike.

Well-connected transportation system.

Elektrostal benefits from an efficient transportation network, including highways, railways, and public transportation options, ensuring convenient travel within and beyond the city.

Famous for its traditional Russian cuisine.

Food enthusiasts can indulge in authentic Russian dishes at numerous restaurants and cafes scattered throughout Elektrostal.

Home to notable architectural landmarks.

Elektrostal boasts impressive architecture, including the Church of the Transfiguration of the Lord and the Elektrostal Palace of Culture.

Offers a wide range of recreational facilities.

Residents and visitors can enjoy various recreational activities, such as sports complexes, swimming pools, and fitness centers, enhancing the overall quality of life.

Provides a high standard of healthcare.

Elektrostal is equipped with modern medical facilities, ensuring residents have access to quality healthcare services.

Home to the Elektrostal History Museum.

The Elektrostal History Museum showcases the city’s fascinating past through exhibitions and displays.

A hub for sports enthusiasts.

Elektrostal is passionate about sports, with numerous stadiums, arenas, and sports clubs offering opportunities for athletes and spectators.

Celebrates diverse cultural festivals.

Throughout the year, Elektrostal hosts a variety of cultural festivals, celebrating different ethnicities, traditions, and art forms.

Electric power played a significant role in its early development.

Elektrostal owes its name and initial growth to the establishment of electric power stations and the utilization of electricity in the industrial sector.

Boasts a thriving economy.

The city’s strong industrial base, coupled with its strategic location near Moscow, has contributed to Elektrostal’s prosperous economic status.

Houses the Elektrostal Drama Theater.

The Elektrostal Drama Theater is a cultural centerpiece, attracting theater enthusiasts from far and wide.

Popular destination for winter sports.

Elektrostal’s proximity to ski resorts and winter sport facilities makes it a favorite destination for skiing, snowboarding, and other winter activities.

Promotes environmental sustainability.

Elektrostal prioritizes environmental protection and sustainability, implementing initiatives to reduce pollution and preserve natural resources.

Home to renowned educational institutions.

Elektrostal is known for its prestigious schools and universities, offering a wide range of academic programs to students.

Committed to cultural preservation.

The city values its cultural heritage and takes active steps to preserve and promote traditional customs, crafts, and arts.

Hosts an annual International Film Festival.

The Elektrostal International Film Festival attracts filmmakers and cinema enthusiasts from around the world, showcasing a diverse range of films.

Encourages entrepreneurship and innovation.

Elektrostal supports aspiring entrepreneurs and fosters a culture of innovation, providing opportunities for startups and business development.

Offers a range of housing options.

Elektrostal provides diverse housing options, including apartments, houses, and residential complexes, catering to different lifestyles and budgets.

Home to notable sports teams.

Elektrostal is proud of its sports legacy, with several successful sports teams competing at regional and national levels.

Boasts a vibrant nightlife scene.

Residents and visitors can enjoy a lively nightlife in Elektrostal, with numerous bars, clubs, and entertainment venues.

Promotes cultural exchange and international relations.

Elektrostal actively engages in international partnerships, cultural exchanges, and diplomatic collaborations to foster global connections.

Surrounded by beautiful nature reserves.

Nearby nature reserves, such as the Barybino Forest and Luchinskoye Lake, offer opportunities for nature enthusiasts to explore and appreciate the region’s biodiversity.

Commemorates historical events.

The city pays tribute to significant historical events through memorials, monuments, and exhibitions, ensuring the preservation of collective memory.

Promotes sports and youth development.

Elektrostal invests in sports infrastructure and programs to encourage youth participation, health, and physical fitness.

Hosts annual cultural and artistic festivals.

Throughout the year, Elektrostal celebrates its cultural diversity through festivals dedicated to music, dance, art, and theater.

Provides a picturesque landscape for photography enthusiasts.

The city’s scenic beauty, architectural landmarks, and natural surroundings make it a paradise for photographers.

Connects to Moscow via a direct train line.

The convenient train connection between Elektrostal and Moscow makes commuting between the two cities effortless.

A city with a bright future.

Elektrostal continues to grow and develop, aiming to become a model city in terms of infrastructure, sustainability, and quality of life for its residents.

In conclusion, Elektrostal is a fascinating city with a rich history and a vibrant present. From its origins as a center of steel production to its modern-day status as a hub for education and industry, Elektrostal has plenty to offer both residents and visitors. With its beautiful parks, cultural attractions, and proximity to Moscow, there is no shortage of things to see and do in this dynamic city. Whether you’re interested in exploring its historical landmarks, enjoying outdoor activities, or immersing yourself in the local culture, Elektrostal has something for everyone. So, next time you find yourself in the Moscow region, don’t miss the opportunity to discover the hidden gems of Elektrostal.

Q: What is the population of Elektrostal?

A: As of the latest data, the population of Elektrostal is approximately XXXX.

Q: How far is Elektrostal from Moscow?

A: Elektrostal is located approximately XX kilometers away from Moscow.

Q: Are there any famous landmarks in Elektrostal?

A: Yes, Elektrostal is home to several notable landmarks, including XXXX and XXXX.

Q: What industries are prominent in Elektrostal?

A: Elektrostal is known for its steel production industry and is also a center for engineering and manufacturing.

Q: Are there any universities or educational institutions in Elektrostal?

A: Yes, Elektrostal is home to XXXX University and several other educational institutions.

Q: What are some popular outdoor activities in Elektrostal?

A: Elektrostal offers several outdoor activities, such as hiking, cycling, and picnicking in its beautiful parks.

Q: Is Elektrostal well-connected in terms of transportation?

A: Yes, Elektrostal has good transportation links, including trains and buses, making it easily accessible from nearby cities.

Q: Are there any annual events or festivals in Elektrostal?

A: Yes, Elektrostal hosts various events and festivals throughout the year, including XXXX and XXXX.

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