The Grudge Informant: Case Study

The Grudge Informant is a case that is easy to look back and pass judgement on since most can agree that the soldiers wife should be punished. H.L.A Hart agrees, but as a legal positivist, he understands that the wife did nothing illegal at the time and cannot be punished for following the law. So, Hart would suggest the only way to legally punish the wife would be to enact a retroactive law that would make conversations between husband and wife confidential therefore making the husbands criticisms of the third reich private and the wifes admission to the gestapo illegal. This demonstrates Hart’s commitment to legal positivism and his opposition to natural law theory because it would set in place a new law that has to be followed while maintaining the legitimacy of the law and

The specific example that H.L.A. Hart uses frequently in defense of his legal positivist position is one of a poorly run monarchy that places their morality into laws. The thing about what they were is doing is that their sense of morality gave an unfair advantage to the monarchy and people of a higher socioeconomic class and degraded the lower class and peasants which would have made up a large part of the population. Inserting their morality into the situation only served to make things worse in a moral sense and also affected people in a very real way. This isn’t to say that natural law is all bad because it is not, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. used natural law in a way that served to drastically increase morality in the America in the 1960’s by using it to defy the laws of the time to worked to integrate African-American individuals into society in a way that was non-violent. The problem with natural law though is that it can be very easily corrupted if put into the hands of the wrong people. Legal positivism doesn’t give the power to the judge in a situation to insert their morality into interpretations of the