Natural law is the obverse of positivism. In other words, the natural law perspective is diametrically opposed to the positivist perspective. Natural law is rooted in, or based on, moral principles, whereas positivism is rooted in the concept that man's laws should be supreme. In the simplest terms, then, one could say that natural law is God's law; positivist law is man's law.
Neil Boyd (1994) asserts in his Canadian Law: An Introduction, "There is no doubt that morality is at the heart of the legal process. However, a perspective that demands a linkage between law and morality must specify the moral premises that will operate at any specific time and place" (p. 10). Boyd (1944) adds, "Since there is no single, clear, morality to guide the operation of legality, an attempt to divine natural law can be compared to trying to nail Jello-O to the wall" (p. 10). "Divination" should be the province of oracles rather than the law; thus, lawyers would presumably be better off working from a positivist perspective, one that is not as relative to the vagaries of time and place. Local standards of morality (as in standards of community decency) pose one stumbling block to reliance upon a natural law point of view.
Positivism, rooted in the British doctrine of parliamentary supremacy, is the philosophical source of laws (valid sets of rules), enforced through a system of economic and social sanctions. As Boyd (1994) notes, "It is vital that the rules be applied correctly, but the morality of the law need not be subjected to scrutiny" (p. 5). Thus, the law is inherently neither moral or amoral, just or unjust; rather, the objective application of the law must be judged in moral terms, not the law itself. The Oxford Reference Dictionary defines positivism with the stipulation that "ideal and moral considerations (e.g., that a rule is unjust) should not limit the scope or operation of the law" (cited in Boyd, 1994, p. 5).
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