BORDERLINES OF LAW IN KANTIAN THOUGHT

In Turkish legal literature, Immanuel Kant is reflected as if he inspects law through eye-glasses of ethics, the philosopher’s ideas about normative systems are considered as a totality and analyzed under the shadow of categorical imperative, which is backed by a total ignorance of his Rechtslehre. It is then an expected outcome that Kant is considered as a natural lawyer. But Kant, sometimes referred to as the killer of natural law put so much effort to draw a border line between law and morality, understood law as a matter of reason and limited its exercise to the external actions of humans. In this article with the title, “Borderlines of Law in Kantian Thought” an artificial contradiction between natural law and legal positivism is avoided and some issues that lie on the borders of Kantian legal thought are raised. As a result of a systemic approach, firstly a clear-cut line between law and morality is drawn, secondly the concepts of natural state, natural rights and natural law are clarified and finally the tension between Kant’s hail to the French Revolution and his strict ideas against the concept of revolution is discussed