The Concept of Law is the most important and original work of legal philosophy written this century. First published in 1961, it is considered the masterpiece of H.L.A. Hart's enormous contribution to the study of jurisprudence and legal philosophy. Its elegant language and balanced arguments have sparked wide debate and unprecedented growth in the quantity and quality of scholarship in this area--much of it devoted to attacking or defending Hart's theories. Principal among Hart's critics is renowned lawyer (...) and political philosopher Ronald Dworkin who in the 1970s and 80s mounted a series of challenges to Hart's Concept of Law. It seemed that Hart let these challenges go unanswered until, after his death in 1992, his answer to Dworkin's criticism was discovered among his papers. In this valuable and long-awaited new edition Hart presents an Epilogue in which he answers Dworkin and some of his other most influential critics including Fuller and Finnis. Written with the same clarity and candor for which the first edition is famous, the Epilogue offers a sharper interpretation of Hart's own views, rebuffs the arguments of critics like Dworkin, and powerfully asserts that they have based their criticisms on a faulty understanding of Hart's work. Hart demonstrates that Dworkin's views are in fact strikingly similar to his own. In a final analysis, Hart's response leaves Dworkin's criticisms considerably weakened and his positions largely in question. Containing Hart's final and powerful response to Dworkin in addition to the revised text of the original Concept of Law, this thought-provoking and persuasively argued volume is essential reading for lawyers and philosophers throughout the world. (shrink)

The Concept of Law is one of the most influential texts in English-language jurisprudence. 50 years after its first publication its relevance has not diminished and in this third edition, Leslie Green adds an introduction that places the book in a contemporary context, highlighting key questions about Hart's arguments and outlining the main debates it has prompted in the field. The complete text of the second edition is replicated here, including Hart's Postscript, with fully updated notes to include (...) modern references and further reading. (shrink)

English translation of a lecture delivered by HLA Hart on 29 October 1979 at the Autonomous University of Madrid. For commentary on the provenance of the lecture and on the methodology of its translation, see Andrzej Grabowski, ‘The Missing Link in the Hart–Dworkin Debate’ 36 Oxford Journal of Legal Studies 476.

More than 50 years after it was first published, The Concept of Law remains the most important work of legal philosophy in the English-speaking world. In this volume, written for both students and specialists, 13 leading scholars look afresh at Hart's great book. Unique in format, the volume proceeds sequentially through all the main ideas in The Concept of Law: each contributor addresses a single chapter of Hart's book, critically discussing its arguments in light of subsequent developments in (...) the field. Four concluding essays assess the continued relevance for jurisprudence of the 'persistent questions' identified by Hart at the beginning of The Concept of Law. The collection also includes Hart's 'Answers to Eight Questions', written in 1988 and never before published in English. Contributors include Timothy Endicott, Richard HS Tur, Pavlos Eleftheriadis, John Gardner, Grant Lamond, Nicos Stavropoulos, Leslie Green, John Tasioulas, Jeremy Waldron, John Finnis, Frederick Schauer, Pierluigi Chiassoni and Nicola Lacey. (shrink)

This article considers HLA Hart's influence in the making of John Finnis's book Natural Law and Natural Rights. In the style of an intellectual biography it traces the history of the interaction between the two Oxford legal philosophers using their correspondence as a starting point. It also delves into Finnis's years in Africa—a period of his life both crucial for the writing of the book and utterly unknown. It argues that Hart's role was significant not only insofar as (...) he was behind the idea of the book but also because of the restrained way in which he freely chose to conduct his role as editor despite the extent of the reservations he had regarding Finnis's work, fully revealed here. Given the importance of Natural Law and Natural Rights for what has been called the ‘new natural law theory’ the article concludes by awarding Hart his due credit in the making of one of that theory's main sources of inspiration. (shrink)

Hart identified a utilitarian tradition in jurisprudence, which he associated with Jeremy Bentham and John Austin. This tradition consisted in three doctrines: the separation of law and morals; the analysis of legal concepts; and the imperative theory of law. I argue, contrary to Hart, that Bentham did not adopt a 'positivist' conception of law whether understood in terms of the separation of legal theory and morality or in terms of the separation of law and morals. Misinterpreting Bentham's approach (...) to the analysis of language, Hart was wrong to assume that Bentham's jurisprudential project was a precursor to his own attempt to provide a morally neutral description of a legal system. It was this assumption that led to mistakes in Hart's editing of Of Laws in General. Bentham's utilitarian theory of law should be recognised as a distinct alternative to Common Law and Natural Law theories. (shrink)

The continuing existence and operation of the traditional law of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples has – relatively recently – been explicitly acknowledged in Australian law. In emerging case law on the subject, the High Court of Australia has confirmed the common law recognition of the survival of Indigenous Australian law. However, in determining what it is that is recognized by the common law – in interpreting Indigenous Australian ‘traditional laws and customs’ – the High Court has disregarded the (...) knowledge reposed in those with authority or expertise in Indigenous Australian law, relying instead upon concepts and assumptions from the jurisprudence of English legal philosopher, HLA Hart. The influence of Hart’s theory in the Australian High Court’s interpretation of Indigenous Australian ‘traditional laws and customs’ is problematic, because it contains an obvious pre-legal–legal dualism reminiscent of the ‘state of nature’ – ‘civil society’ mechanism that was instrumental in the application of terra nullius to Australia. At the heart of The Concept of Law lies the notion of progression from a ‘primitive community’ with only primary rules, to an advanced legal system with a combination of both primary and secondary rules. In this article, I investigate how Indigenous Australians are positioned in relation to Hart’s pre-legal–legal dualism. I examine the ‘primitive’, pre-legal society in The Concept of Law, and its counterpart, the advanced legal system, to analyze the position of Indigenous Australian societies and law in Hart’s scheme. Finally, I analyze the construction of the dualism and consider its impact on the High Court’s interpretation of Indigenous Australian ‘traditional laws and customs’. (shrink)

In 1985, Swiss legal philosopher Walter Ott visited Herbert Hart in Oxford and made this record of their meeting, which casts novel light on some of Hart’s ideas. Ott engaged Hart in a fresh encounter with the legal philosophy of Gustav Radbruch, particularly Hart’s and Radbruch’s reasons for a minimum content of justice in law. They also discussed the grudge informer, state responsibility under laws of an earlier régime, and questions of the definition and falsifiability of (...) legal theories. Hart surprisingly reported Hans Kelsen as stating, when they had met at Berkeley in 1961, that Hume (and not Kant, and certainly not Wittgenstein) was the greatest philosopher who had ever lived. The translation is accompanied with annotations explaining references, assumptions and contexts. (shrink)

HLA Hart has sometimes been associated with the false proposition that there is 'no necessary connection between law and morality'. Nigel Simmonds is the latest critic to make the association. He offers an 'ironic' interpretation of a famous passage in Hart's The Concept of Law in which the proposition is apparently rejected as false by Hart. In this paper I explain why, even if Simmonds's ironic interpretation is tenable, it does not associate Hart with the proposition (...) in the way that Simmonds believes that it does. More affirmatively, I show that among several necessary connections between law and morality that Hart defends, there is an important indirect one that runs from law to legality, from legality to justice, and from justice to morality. (shrink)

Introduction HLA Hart: A biographical sketch Jurisprudence is the theoretical study of a practical subject. Its object is to achieve a systematic and ...

This paper first recapitulates the objections by H.L.A. Hart to the ways in which John Austin’s command model of law obfuscated the importance and the very existence of power-conferring laws. Although those objections are familiar in the world of contemporary legal philosophy, their insightfulness is highlighted here because they contrast so sharply with Hart’s own neglect of power-conferring laws at some key junctures in his theorizing. In the second half of this paper, I ponder a few of the (...) junctures where Hart failed to heed the admonitions which he had so deftly leveled against Austin. (shrink)

HLA Hart and Joseph Raz are usually interpreted as being fundamentally opposed to Lon Fuller’s argument in The Morality of Law that the principles of the rule of law are of moral value. Hart and Raz are thought to make the ‘instrumental objection’, which says that these principles are of no moral value because they are actually principles derived from reflection on how to best allow the law to guide behaviour. Recently, many theorists have come to Fuller’s defence (...) against Hart and Raz, refuting the ‘instrumental objection’ and affirming the non-instrumental moral value of conformity to the principles of legality. This article argues that although this moral value should be affirmed, the orthodox view is incorrect, because Hart and Raz never understood their arguments about the instrumental or ‘purposive’ value of the principles of legality as denials of their moral value, as a close reading of their work shows. (shrink)

This paper discusses the main criticism launched against legal monism and the Pure Theory of Law, as envisaged by Hans Kelsen and the other proponents of the Vienna School of Jurisprudence, namely the criticism voiced by two of the most eminent legal theorists, HLA Hart and Joseph Raz. According to them, legal monism fails to offer a satisfactory theory of the identity of legal systems and it therefore simply cannot be considered a viable theory of legal systems, because it (...) leads to obviously absurd consequences. These arguments which take the form of an attack on the most basic tenets of the Pure Theory of Law and thus legal monism, will be duly addressed and consequently rebutted in this paper, particularly in order to be able to maintain legal monism in its juridico-epistemological manifestation as a working and viable theory of the law. (shrink)

Commentary by the translator on the publication of HLA Hart, ‘The New Challenge to Legal Positivism ’ 36 Oxford Journal of Legal Studies 459.

This incisive book deals with the use of the criminal law to enforce morality, in particular sexual morality, a subject of particular interest and importance since the publication of the Wolfenden Report in 1957. Professor Hart first considers John Stuart Mill's famous declaration: "The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community is to prevent harm to others." During the last hundred years this doctrine has twice been sharply challenged by two (...) great lawyers: Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, the great Victorian judge and historian of the common law, and Lord Devlin, who both argue that the use of the criminal law to enforce morality is justified. The author examines their arguments in some detail, and sets out to demonstrate that they fail to recognize distinction of vital importance for legal and political theory, and that they espouse a conception of the function of legal punishment that few would now share. (shrink)

It has become commonplace to ask, whenever anything has gone wrong, what lessons can be learned from the experience. But the appearance of open‐endedness in that question is misleading: not every answer that we could give to it is acceptable. There are, in the context of such a question, tacit constraints in what counts as a valid lesson to be learned. The article considers what these constraints might be and the different kinds of lessons one might learn from experience, which (...) the common way of taking the question ignores. Initially I attempt to distinguish between lessons that have to do with action and those that have to do with understanding, between lessons that are about the results of our actions and those that are about the meaning of actions and events. On closer examination, however, these distinctions are seen to break down, to represent a difference of degree rather than of kind. In the latter part of the article, therefore, I find the crucial distinction to be between lessons that we can apply, while being ourselves unchanged, and lessons which, by changing the way in which we see and respond to people and events, re‐constitute ourselves and thus express themselves through us willy‐nilly in our subsequent thoughts, words and actions. (shrink)

Rechtsfilosofische studie over de Italiaanse denker (1668-1744).

In this long-awaited work, Ray L. Hart offers a speculative theology that profoundly challenges traditional understandings of God. Drawing on a lifetime of reading in philosophy and religious thought, Hart unfolds a vision of God perpetually in process: an unfinished God. Breaking out of the classical doctrine of divine persons, Hart reimagines Trinity as composed of theogony, cosmogony, and anthropogony an emerging Godhead in relation to origins, temporal creation, and human existence. The book s ultimate import is (...) that all of Being and Nonbeing emerges together in interrelation and interdependence. This divine reality, Hart explains, is unfinished, imperfect, still in the course of a living-dying process that implicates all things, existent and inexistent, temporal and eternal. Doctrinal closuresomething that every orthodox theology requiresthus becomes impossible, and rightly so. Hart confronts those orthodoxies by asking: How can thinking of God reach closure when the divine is itself unfinished and its appearance to us always amounts to new creation? Hart s insights open the potencies of the nothing to the actualization of freedomthe freedom to create. That is, the nothing is not for nothingit is procreative. In the domain of radical speculative theology, then, Hart offers a fully deconstructive revisioning of the Christian God as ever an emerging and self-transfiguring actuality. It is a work with which all serious students of theology will wish to contend.". (shrink)

Explores Blanchot's philosophical meditation on three poets, Mallarmé, Hölderlin, and René Char alongside his contribution to Jewish philosophy.

In Lands of Likeness, philosopher, theologian, and poet Kevin Hart utilizes the history of Christian thought and secular philosophy to develop a novel and profound hermeneutics of contemplation. Drawing in particular on the work of Arthur Schopenhauer, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Edmund Husserl, Hart traces the development of notions of contemplation in modernity and refines the approaches he finds there. Utilizing his refined approach, Hart trains our attention on modern poems from G. M. Hopkins, Wallace Stevens, A. (...) R. Ammons, Geoffrey Hill and others as sites for a kind of contemplative reading that phenomenology can make precise. Delivered in its original form as the prestigious Gifford Lectures, Lands of Likeness is a revelatory meditation on contemplation for the modern world. (shrink)

Rowan Williams says that David Bentley Hart "can always be relied on to offer a perspective on the Christian faith that is both profound and unexpected." The Hidden and the Manifest, a new collection of this brilliant scholar's work, contains twenty essays by Hart on theology and metaphysics. Spanning Hart's career both topically and over time, these essays cover such subjects as the Orthodox understanding of Eucharistic sacrifice; the metaphysics of Paradise Lost; Christianity, modernity, and freedom; death, (...) final judgment, and the meaning of life; and many more. (shrink)

The thrust of this paper addresses how the notion of an author relates to the authority of a law. Drawing from the legal thought of Hobbes, Bentham, and John Austin, the Paper offers a sense of the author as a distinct institutional source of the state. The Paper then addresses the more difficult legal theories in this context: those of HLA Hart, Ronald Dworkin and Hans Kelsen. The clue to the latter as well as the earlier theorists is a (...) presupposed inaccessible author or ghost. The presupposed ghost of the law is crucial to the binding character of a law. (shrink)

First, this collection seeks to examine exactly what Levinass writings mean for both Jews and Christians. Second, it takes a snapshot of the current state of Jewish-Christian dialogue, using Levinas as the rationale for the discussion. Three generations of Levinas scholars are represented. Contributors: Leora Batnitzky, Jeffrey Bloechl, Richard A. Cohen, Paul Franks, Robert Gibbs, Kevin Hart, Dana Hollander, Robyn Horner, Jeffrey L. Kosky, Jean-Luc Marion, Michael Purcell, Michael A. Signer, Merold Westphal, Elliott R. Wolfson, Edith Wyschogrod.