Abstract

2011 marks the 50th anniversary of the publication of H. L. A. Hart’s The Concept of Law - a milestone in the development of legal positivism. The book gained its broad influence particularly through the early critique by Ronald Dworkin. Five decades later the Hart-Dworkin debate still constitutes the discursive centre of Anglo-American legal philosophy. Multiple factors add to the persistent dynamic of the debate, including the multilayered critique of Dworkin himself, but also the broad and controversial reception of Dworkin’s theoretical counter-conceptions of law as a system of rules and principles and „law as interpretation“. Perhaps most importantly, in response to Dworkin the competing schools of inclusive and exclusive legal positivism emerged in simultaneous defense and modernization of the Hartian tradition. The relation of the Hart-Dworkin debate to German legal philosophy is marked by ambivalences. Although the philosophy of Gustav Radbruch played an important role in the formation phase of Hart’s theory, the discursive link weakened over the years, mainly due to the discourse-shifting influence of the substantial features of the German Grundgesetz of 1949.