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What Useful Role (If Any) Could Legal Positivism Play In The Study Or Advancement Of International Law?, Mortimer N.S. Sellers

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What useful role (if any) could legal positivism play in the study or advancement of international law? For most of those who remember this once fashionable term at all, "international legal positivism" is redolent of the early years of the twentieth century-of Lassa Oppenheim' at best, and at worst of his model, John Austin, who famously denied that international law is or ever could be genuine law at all, "properly so called." 2 "Positive" law in its central and most usual sense is law "set by a sovereign individual or a sovereign body ... to a person or persons in …