Reclaiming Fuller -- Before the debate -- The 1958 debate -- The morality of law -- The reply to critics -- Resituating Fuller I : Raz -- Resituating Fuller II : Dworkin -- Three conversations.

As two parts of one overarching legal positivist project, it is likely assumed that the constitutive elements of Joseph Raz’s analysis of the rule of law are compatible with his thinking on the nature of legal authority. The aim of this article is to call this assumption into question by reading Raz in light of the core, if under-recognised, preoccupation of the jurisprudence of Lon Fuller: namely, the latter’s concern to illuminate the relationship between the distinctive form of law and (...) human agency. This not only opens up a new engagement between Raz and Fuller that was far from exhausted within debates about law and morality, but also reveals tensions between Raz’s analysis of the rule of law and his analysis of legal authority that proponents of Raz’s legal positivism need to address. (shrink)

Author’s reply to four commentaries on ‘Legal Subjects and Juridical Persons: Developing Public Legal Theory through Fuller and Arendt.’.

The ‘public’ character of the kind of rule of law theorizing with which Lon Fuller was engaged is signalled especially in his attention to the very notion of being a ’legal subject’ at all. This point is central to the aim of this paper to explore the animating commitments, of substance and method alike, of a particular direction of legal theorizing: one which commences its inquiry from an assessment of conditions of personhood within a public legal frame. Opening up this (...) inquiry to resources beyond Fuller, the paper makes a novel move in its consideration of how the political theorist Hannah Arendt’s reflections on the ‘juridical person’ might aid a legal theoretical enterprise of this kind. (shrink)

Teased out through a playful tale about a king who failed in eight ways to make law, Lon L. Fuller's eight principles of the ‘internal morality of law’ became an important contribution to legal philosophy and rule of law theory alike. Moreover, it was Fuller's claim that his principles were not just internal to the enterprise of law, but also ‘moral’ in character, that precipitated a particular kind of ‘natural law versus legal positivism’ contest that continues among legal philosophers today. (...) But as a recent revival of interest in Fuller's thought indicates, his scholarly agenda around the idea of ‘the internal morality of law’ was wider still and deserves revisiting for the range of avenues of inquiry it opens up. (shrink)