Abstract

In this paper I want to reconnect the theoretical debate on the concept of law and the relationship between law and morality with legal issues constituted by highly unjust norms. Proceeding from a critique of more or less emphatic positivist attempts at ethical purification of legal thought, I shall roughly sketch a Davidsonian-Dworkinian framework which seems to provide us with a more appropriate background for dealing with immoral norms than positivist and natural law accounts. This claim will be substantiated by way of an analysis of three different cases: (1) immoral norms of a past system of civil law; (2) immoral norms of a past system of criminal law; (3) immoral norms of the present legal system.