Arthur Kaufmann’s Way of Legal Philosophy

Abstract

The legal philosophy of Arthur Kaufmann (1923-2001), a German legal philosopher and the most prominent disciple of Gustav Radbruch, focuses on the "third way" between legal positivism and natural law. The legal philosophical way of his thought is not possible to comprehend fully without a methodological division into three areas: 1) ontology of law, 2) legal hermeneutics and 3) personal philosophy of law.

It must be stressed that boundaries between these domains are not clear. They cannot be delineated with precision and unambiguously as the thoughts that prevail in one domain are to be found in earlier publications, while new considerations that gradually become prominent are linked with earlier ones.