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Legal Positivism Analysis

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INTRODUCTION The trial and sentencing of Adolf Eichmann, stands to be one of the most prolific trials post the Nuremberg trials. Adolf Eichmann, the SS Obersturmbannfuhrer (Lt. Colonel) headed the RSHA Section IV B4, the Race and Settlement Office of the Nazi government, which administered the extermination of European Jewry. It is against this backdrop that this paper seeks to analyze some of the legal intricacies of the Eichmann trial in the context of natural and positivist legal theories in a bid to resolve the following questions: Firstly, whether an immoral law or unjust law is really law and whether the same should be obeyed; and secondly, whether in the view of Adolf Eichmann’s defence of him merely following lawful orders, should …show more content…

Legal positivism is thus distinguished by two central claims: that law is separable from its substantive morality and that there is no necessary link between law and morality. Thus, both Hart and Austin propound that the existence of a law and our duty to obey such law, even if we dislike it are two different queries. It is often argued that legal positivism assisted in legitimizing the Nazi rule. According to Hart’s Rule of Recognition, the master test of legal validity, there must not only exist both a convergent practice among officials of applying certain criteria of legal validity in deciding which norms are laws, but also that the officials adopt an “internal point of view” towards this practice, that is, they believe they have an obligation to do …show more content…

It is understood to describe a bureaucratic and a legal phenomenon. Organizationally removed from mass killing, superior officers sanctioned, functionaries such as Eichmann could claim to have participated in the Final Solution out of a feeling of obligation. Thus, Holocaust was viewed as the perfection, rather than as the perversion, of legal positivism-the idea that the legitimacy of a legal command derives from its status as law, and not from any underlying normative content. It shall be recalled that Eichmann viewed his behavior as law-abiding and therefore just. He felt “free of all guilt” secure in the knowledge that his superiors knew and approved of his actions as many of the officers of the

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