The legal positivists, on the other hand, maintain that there is no necessary connection between law and morality. As John Austin states in The Province of Jurisprudence Determined (1955), "The existence of law is one thing; its merit or demerit is another. Whether it be or be not is one enquiry; either it be or be not conformable to an assumed standard, is a different inquiry." Legal positivists claim that any law is law, including the law of slavery. Such law may be repulsive, but to deny its legality would be to ignore the fact that someone such as John Brown could be adjudicated a criminal and executed for violating the law. Although contemporary society can honor John Brown as a hero and respect him for his crime, the fact remains to positivists that the government was not "mistaken" in condemning him. Simply, the law is no less law merely because people find it morally reprehensible. With such reasoning, legal positivists urge society to challenge unjust laws, even to break them, as they remind society that no law per se demands a duty of compliance other than the "duty" that can be materially coerced by fear or force.

Rather than having some grounding in a notion of "unchanging human goods," laws are considered to be the result of social conventions such as "commands," "social rules," or other norms that are not necessarily moral norms. Jeremy Bentham and Austin both argued that the law is the command of power by a sovereign and that the idea of law is content-neutral. Austin, for example, rejected English jurist William Blackstone's assertion that no human law that conflicts with God's law is obligatory or binding. Austin argued that human laws do not lose their authority when they conflict with divine law (often interpreted as natural law). Such laws, in fact, exist and are continually enforced by the courts:

Suppose an act innocuous, or positively beneficial, be prohibited by the sovereign under the penalty of death; if I commit this act, I shall be tried and condemned, and if I object to the sentence, that it is contrary to the law of God, who has commanded that the human lawgivers shall not prohibit acts which have no evil consequences, the Court of Justice will demonstrate the inconclusiveness of my reasoning by hanging me up, in pursuance of the law of which I have impugned the validity.
– The Province of Jurisprudence Determined