Via Michael Sevel (Sydney) (who is finishing a book on the moral, political and legal philosophy of Raz for OUP), I came across this very nice, synoptic account of Raz's life and work by his former student Timothy Endicott (now the Vinerian Professor of English Law at Oxford) (it starts at page 148). The following paragraph was particularly perspicuous I thought and sums up nicely how Raz went very wrong in his legal philosophy:
Joseph never expressed in his work any doubt as to the objectivity of moral rights and duties. And he thought that if you have a legal right or duty, that means that the law purports to confer or to impose a moral right or duty, which the law enforces through its systematic, institutionalised techniques. This approach made the theory of law a part of the general theory of practical reason, so that the question of whether the law ought to be obeyed lies at the centre of jurisprudence (whereas to Hart, it was a peripheral question, detached from his account of the concept of law). In common with natural law theory, Joseph believed that the normativity of law and morality are one (since the law claims to impose moral duties), and that ‘There are inherent connections between legal concepts and moral concepts, and between law and morality.’
I touched on aspects of this misguided turn in the positivist tradition in my essay on "Legal Positivism as a Realist Theory of Law" for the Cambridge Companion to Legal Positivism.
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