

The above mentioned schools of legal thoughts are only part of a diverse jurisprudential picture of the United States. But it allows that people might choose to have the content of their law depend on moral facts, as they seem to do, for example, when they prohibit punishment that is cruel, or confer rights to legal protections that are equal. According to inclusive legal positivists, moral facts might play a part in determining the content of the law, but only if the relevant social practices assign them that role. Inclusive legal positivism is a form of positivism because it holds that social facts are the ultimate determinants of the content of the law, and that the law might be determined by social facts alone.According to anti-positivists, moral facts determine the legal relevance of actions which people/institutions take.According to exclusive legal positivists, what makes up the law is exclusively determined by social facts.Some have attempted to break down schools of positivism and naturalism (aka: anti-positivism) into 3 distinct groups: They argue that moral philosophy, religion, human reason and individual conscience are also integrate parts of the law. Naturalists, or proponents of natural law, insist that the rules enacted by government are not the only sources of law. Positivists argue that there is no connection between law and morality and the the only sources of law are rules that have been expressly enacted by a governmental entity or court of law. NaturalistsĪpart from the realist-formalist dichotomy, there is the classic debate over the appropriate sources of law between positivist and natural law schools of thought. Some legal realists even believe that a judge is able to shape the outcome of the case based on personal biases. This line, realists maintain, is drawn according to the political, economic, and psychological inclinations of the judge. In contrast, proponents of legal realism believe that most cases before courts present hard questions that judges must resolve by balancing the interests of the parties and ultimately drawing an arbitrary line on one side of the dispute.

Formalists believe that a judge identifies the relevant legal principles, applies them to the facts of a case, and logically deduces a rule that will govern the outcome of the dispute. Formalism, or conceptualism, treats law like math or science.

Legal philosophy has many aspects, but four of them are the most common: The Conclusion summarizes these main findings.The word jurisprudence derives from the Latin term juris prudentia, which means "the study, knowledge, or science of law." In the United States jurisprudence commonly means the philosophy of law.

Finally, Section iv provides a general overview of the normative relevance of institutional practice. Section iii discusses its employment by the International Law Commission, which distinguishes ‘subsequent’ institutional practice as a means of interpretation of the constitutive instrument, ‘general’ institutional practice as an element of customary law, and ‘established’ institutional practice as a rule of the organisation. After a brief introduction, the second section focuses on what constitutes institutional practice, distinguishing between the problem of the acts that constitute practice and how they are attributed to the organisation. It requires a further element to produce normative effects, whether in the form of Member States’ practice or other means of interpretation of the constitutive instrument. The core argument is that institutional practice is less relevant than it seems in the first instance and, generally, it cannot do much by itself. It describes all the normative theories involved, and proposes a simplified and comprehensive framework. This paper aims to define the notion of institutional practice and it examines the extent to which United Nations organs and Member States can rely on and are limited by it.
