The validity of demonstrably wrong law cannot conceivably be justified. However, any answer to the question of the purpose of law other than by enume… - Gustav Radbruch

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The validity of demonstrably wrong law cannot conceivably be justified. However, any answer to the question of the purpose of law other than by enumerating the manifold partisan views about it has proved impossible— and it is precisely on that impossibility of any natural law, and on that alone, that the validity of positive law may be founded. At this point relativism, so far only the method of our approach, enters our system as a structural element.
Ordering their living together cannot be left to the legal notions of the individuals who live together, since these different human beings will possibly issue contradictory directions. Rather, it must be uniformly governed by a transindividual authority. Since, however, in the relativistic view of reason and science are unable to fulfill that task, will and power must undertake it. If no one is able to determine what is just, somebody must lay down what is to be legal.

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About Gustav Radbruch

Gustav Radbruch (21 November 1878 – 23 November 1949) was a German legal scholar and politician.

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Concepts such as legal subject and legal object, legal relation and legal wrong, and indeed the very concept of law itself, are not accidental possessions of several or all legal orders but are necessary prerequisites if any legal order is to be understood as legal.

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Because a judgement on the truth or error of the differing convictions in law is impossible, and because on the other hand a uniform law for all citizens is necessary, the law-giver faces the task of cleaving with a stroke of the sword the Gordian knot which jurisprudence cannot untangle. Since it is impossible to ascertain what is just, it must be decided what is lawful. In lieu of an act of truth (which is impossible) an act of authority is required. Relativism leads to positivism.

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