positive law
positive law noun: law explicitly made, as compared to natural law; law prescribed by express enactment or institution.
Noun
positive law (usually uncountable, plural positive laws)
- Law explicitly made, as compared to natural law; law prescribed by express enactment or institution.
- We know that generally in all commonwealths, the execution of corporal punishments, was either put upon the guards, or other soldiers of the sovereign power; or given to those, in whom want of means, contempt of honour, and hardness of heart, concurred, to make them sue for such an office. But...1651, Thomas Hobbes, The Leviathan
- But the same term, positive law, is also very often used to designate statute law or positive legislation, as distinguished from customary or unwritten law derived by the judicial application of natural reason.a. 1862, John Codman Hurd, The Law Of Freedom And Bondage In The United States, page 576
positive law meaning in Tamil and Vietnamese
positive law in Tamil
- அரசுறுத்தச் சட்டம்
positive law in Vietnamese
- Translations
- pháp luật thực định
Examples of positive law in a sentence
- But amongst the Israelites it was a positive law of God their sovereign, that he that was convicted of a capital crime, should be stoned to death by the people.1651, Thomas Hobbes, The Leviathan:
- There are four kinds of law: the eternal law, the natural law, the divine positive law and human positive law.1962, Frederick Copleston, A history of philosophy, volume 2, page 418:
Forms of positive law
| plural | positive laws |
|---|
Origin of positive law
1651: From Thomas Hobbes, The Leviathan
Questions about positive law
- What does positive law mean?
- Positive law means law explicitly made, as compared to natural law; law prescribed by express enactment or institution.
- What is positive law in Tamil?
- Positive law in Tamil is அரசுறுத்தச் சட்டம். See Positive law meaning in Tamil.
- How do you use positive law in a sentence?
- But amongst the Israelites it was a positive law of God their sovereign, that he that was convicted of a capital crime, should be stoned to death by the people.
- What part of speech is positive law?
- Positive law is a noun.
- What is the plural of positive law?
- The plural of positive law is positive laws.
Words near positive law in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: positive law (page history and authors); positive law (Tamil Wiktionary) (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.
Last updated:
Cite this entry: “positive law.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/positive_law. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.