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Moral Conflict Within The United States Constitution

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Never before has a legal case caused me so much moral conflict within; a runaway slave in the state of Indiana so close to freedom yet faced with the impending possibility of being returned back to servitude stands before me in the Court. As a moral human being, I want nothing more than to ignore the law and allow the runaway to live out his days as a free man. But as a judge dedicated to serving my country through the Court, I cannot ignore that the law is binding and that the Fugitive Slave clause of the federal Constitution urges me to sentence the runaway slave to return to the party in which he escaped. Regardless of my abolitionist beliefs, as a circuit court judge in the state of Indiana I am implored to take a positivist stance and firmly stand by my decision to return the slave to the state in which he fled from.
Judges bound to uphold the United States Constitution under positivist legal theory do so regardless of the morality of the law, but rather because of an obligation to the law because it is a valid part of the legal system. HLA Hart’s positivist perspective defines law as the union of primary and secondary rules, and that we follow those rules simply because they are consistent with the rule of recognition. Looking at slave law, we see that we as humans posited laws such as the Fugitive Slave Act, setting them into stone as law in the United States. But even though we can argue that slave law is morally wrong, positive law in America provides for it. In

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