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Mario Jori, "The Object and Method of Legal Science", in Law and Language. The Italian Analytic School (click here for further details): This essay tries to explain the differences between two approaches to jurisprudence among modern legal positivists of the analytical persuasion. The first approach deals with the law as an object (of description or evaluation). The second is concerned with the method of describing (or evaluating) the law. The first is typical of Hart's theory, the second is more common among continental legal positivists. The first attempts to explain what the law is, and the second how the law can be properly described. This essay attempts a comparative analysis of the Anglo-Saxon approach by Hart and others and the continental approach by Bobbio and Scarpelli of the Italian school of legal positivism. The essay argues that both questions and approaches are in the end one and the same and complete each other: some sort of objective knowledge of positive law is a necessary prerequisite to certainty, to the division between the legislative and the judicial, and to the democratic justification of law as the product of political choice. e-mail: jori@fildir.unimi.it

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