STATE AS AN ESSENTIAL ELEMENT FOR A THEORY OF LAW: LEGAL CENTRALISM

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Author : Fahrizal S.Siagian, S.H.,M.H.

 (Doctor In Law Student, Faculty of Law, Universitas Sumatera Utara)

    State and law are the two inseparable variables in the school of legal positivism. As John Gardner formulates, legal positivism is the proposition that in any legal system, whether a given norm is legally valid, and hence whether it forms part of the law of that system, depends on its sources, not its merits. Legal positivism has at least three constitutive elements. The first is the conceptual separation of law and morality, i.e. the distinction between what law is and what it ought to be. The second is the sources of law, i.e., where law gets its normativity and coerciveness from and finally, the role of judges in adjudication. Legal philosophers in the school of legal positivism have addressed the first and the third elements differently. For instance, classical legal positivists (mainly Bentham and Hobbs) advance their theories from the outside perspective of law in the natural law tradition, while contemporary legal positivists (Hart and Kelsen) posit their theories internally within law. However, all agree on the second element, i.e. the state as a supreme source of law. Precisely because of this, the school of legal positivism conditions law's normativity and coerciveness to its affiliation to the state. As a result, according to the legal positivism school, a theory of law presupposes a state. Max Weber opined that it is '[a] compulsory political association with continuous organisation […] will be called a “state” if and in so far as its administrative staff successfully upholds a claim to the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force in the enforcement of its order'. The principle of sovereignty in political theory and the monopoly of violence and the legitimate use of force in social theory makes the state a supreme social entity and a fountain of law and legality. Moreover, as Mark Janis observes, the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia '[…] enthroned and sanctified sovereigns [states], gave them powers domestically and independence externally'. This Westphalian concept of the state animates the corpus of the legal positivism school. For instance, law is defined by Jean Bodin as 'the command of a sovereign prince; and by John Austin as a 'command of the sovereign'. Hence, sovereignty, regardless of where it resides, is the source of law and legality according to both Bodin and Austin. Furthermore, Hans Kelsen posits a legal theory, which unifies the theory of law and the theory of state. For Kelsen, a state is a 'personification of the legal order', or a 'juristic expression of the law'. He situates law, in turn, in terms of a hierarchy of norms, and the highest norm being the ultimate criteria of legality. The test of legality rests on the de facto 'positive, effective and coercive order' of the state. HLA Hart describes law as 'the union of primary and secondary rules'; therefore, the legality of a rule rests on its fitness in these systems of rules. In addition to his clear mention that his theory is based on the practice of law within a state system, Hart finds it difficult to find secondary rules in primitive societies. As law is a union of primary and secondary rules for Hart, the absence of the latter makes the concept of law incomplete or absent in pre-state societies. Neil MacCormick, for his part, defines law as 'institutional normative order' of the state.
    Thus, as these theories posit the existence of the state as a necessary precondition for a theory of law, the absence of a state will make the concept of law unintelligible or even absent. This is usually called legal centralism as it ties law's normativity and coerciveness to the state. As aptly put by Griffiths, for legal centralism Law is and should be the law of the state, uniform for all persons, exclusive of all other law, and administered by a single set of state institutions'. As the idea of the state in Africa is a European creation during the advent of colonialism, the legal centralist view, ipso facto, excludes the pre-colonial African legal experience, as it could not pass the tests of legality provided by the school of legal positivism. However, as we shall see in the next section, this view is heavily criticised for epistemological and methodological reasons.

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