Full text of the paper:
Proceedings of the Faculty of Law, Novi Sad
2024, vol. LVIII, br. 2, str.355-370
working language: Serbian
Review paper
udk: 343.2/.7:177 340.12
doi:10.5937/zrpfns58-53486
Author:
Marko Trajković
University of Nis
Faculty of Law in Nis
marko@prafak.ni.ac.rs
ORCID ID: 0000-0001-5302-918X
Dragiša Drakić
University of Novi Sad
Faculty of Law in Novi Sad
d.drakic@pf.uns.ac.rs
ORCID ID: 0000-0002-5248-6562
Summary:
Law is a possible source of moral good, but at the same time a source of possible immorality. Several different directions in the theory and philosophy of law tended to interpret law from an extremely normativist-positivist level, which always denied the necessary connection between law and moral values. In this way, the law was brought into the domain of its application in the role of “instigator” of immoral acts, which is especially dangerous in the matter of criminal law. As such, value-neutral, it was no longer able, as Leo Strauss states, to distinguish good from evil. Thus, the attitude “the law is the law” led to the collapse of human dignity, all in the name of legal certainty, which as a legal value is provided through the positivist and normativist plane. Efforts to explain the world of law apart from society and the world of values led to the definition of the concept of law, but at the same time it narrowed it and limited its domain of application, which caused irreversible damage.
Key words:
law, criminal law, legal positivism, normativism, morality, immorality, values.