Has the 19th century seen the consolidation of a new legal paradigm in the Global North and its expansion in the Global South? Legal positivism had long been in the making, and some draw its conceptual roots all the way back to Thomas Hobbes or John Locke, but it is with Jeremy Bentham and John Austin in the Anglo-Saxon context and later Hans Kelsen in the European continental context that legal positivism has been theorised in its current form. Quite attached to the notion of autonomy of the legal system, legal positivism adopts a definition of law that heavily centres around the state and is anchored in the constitution for its ultimate justification. As such, legal positivism relegates other forms of normativity outside the confines of (state) law.
