Exclusionary Positivism in Anglo-American Legal Thought: Defining a Direction

The paper examines the current trend in modern Anglo-American scientific discourse— exclusionary legal positivism. It is established that this trend was the result of the natural development of the conceptual provisions developed in the Anglo-American positivist doctrine by the efforts of jurists led by Herbert Hart. These provisions include the thesis of social fact, according to which law is a formal public institution that develops in public practice; the thesis of conventionality, according to which such facts are based on social convention in the   practice of officials; the thesis of separation, which establishes the need for a conceptual distinction between law and morality, as well as independence of legal reality from non-legal arguments. The latter thesis has become the most difficult to defend against criticism, which was spearheaded by Ronald Dvorkin. The response to this criticism led to the formation of an exclusionary legal positivism, which, taking a defensive position, set the task of formulating counterarguments. An analysis of the views of the leading exclusionary positivists made it possible to formulate a conceptual understanding of the trend as a theory that understands law as a formal institution in a system of social facts that provide individuals with grounds for actions that can be identified among other regulatory regulators based on their origin from official authority, without resorting to value judgments. The arguments put forward by the direction and the context of its positioning in scientific discourse are of significant cognitive interest for the modernization of Russian doctrine and the formation of a forecast for the development of the discussion on the integrative foundations of legal understanding.

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