Legal positivism is a school of thought of
philosophy of law and
jurisprudence, largely developed by eighteenth and nineteenth-century legal thinkers such as
Jeremy Bentham and
John Austin. However, the most prominent figure in the history of legal positivism is
H. L. A. Hart, whose work
The Concept of Law caused a fundamental re-thinking of the positivist doctrine and its relationship with the other principal theories of law. In more recent years the central claims of legal positivism have come under attack from
Ronald Dworkin.