JORAS - Nigerian Journal of Religion and Society

ancient era. There have been divergent opinions on what the concept of law is. The adherents of such divergence hold irreconcilable views about what constitutes the basic concept of law. The contemporary analytic school thought of harmonising the extreme schools – the old- age-long naturalist's doctrine and the modern legal positivism and realism – by seeking to explain the concept of law as a specie of rules that characterise a modern municipal society, built on democratic principles. The aim of the contemporary analytics is to provide a new purview for legal fecundity. Indeed, the “open texture” doctrine is one of the mechanisms introduced by the analytics to provide agility to the rigid doctrines of the positivists and the realists. This is thought of to resolve some penumbra issues in the interpretation of law by the legal actors. However, this brings to bare the “minimum content of morals” that is required to play in the discretionary role of the legal actors. Perhaps, it is at this point lawyers disagree with philosophers, for the positivists evince that the nature of law is what “is” and does not include what it “ought to be.” Given the challenges to evaluate the nature of law built from Hart's various species of social and legal rules, the work seeks to ascertain the compelling force of modern legal systems owing to the fact of their various interpretations in diverse social phenomena to determine the possibility of obtrusive legal applications.

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