Abstract

Many other institutions and practices might be normative and important for social coherence and political concordance. But they are not law. They are the subjects of theology, ethics, economics, politics, psychology, sociology, anthropology, and other humane disciplines. They stand beyond the province of jurisprudence properly determined. This positivist theory of law, which swept over American universities from the early years onwards, rendered legal study increasingly narrow and insular. Law was simply the sovereign's rules.