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(RE)TAKING HART
by Frederick Schauer [ Full Text ] |
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119 Harv. L. Rev. 852 (2006)
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| A LIFE OF H.L.A. HART: THE NIGHTMARE AND THE NOBLE DREAM. By Nicola Lacey. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2004. Pp. xxii, 422. $35.00. |
| H.L.A. Hart was one of the giants of twentieth-century jurisprudence, and the publication of Nicola Lacey’s definitive biography has as a result become somewhat of a jurisprudential event. The book’s importance is a function of Hart’s exalted status within twentieth-century legal theory and the skill with which Lacey locates within Hart’s career many of the recent changes in the goals and methods of jurisprudence itself. Lacey’s book is thus not only about Hart, but also about the practice of jurisprudence, and the occasion of the book’s publication provides an opportunity to reflect on that practice and on Hart’s place within it. |
| One of Lacey’s major themes is the key role that Hart played in the transformation of jurisprudential methodology. Prior to Hart, jurisprudence was, to be sure, a theoretical topic, but it was only rarely a philosophical one. Hart’s own philosophical proclivities and training, however, combined with his close connection to the Oxford philosophical community, led him to reconceive the methodology of jurisprudence almost exclusively in analytic philosophical terms. |
| Yet although the philosophication of jurisprudence has had, for better or worse, lasting significance, the same cannot be said for many of Hart’s substantive contributions. Largely as a result of the challenges of Ronald Dworkin, Hart’s successor as Professor of Jurisprudence at Oxford, much of Hart’s work has been called upon to support one or the other side of debates about adjudication and about the explanatory virtues of different versions of legal positivism. Yet Hart himself was less focused on these topics than is now assumed, and they only make brief appearances in his major works. Lacey is thus right to emphasize Hart’s often neglected contributions, for in doing so she helps us take from Hart’s work important lessons about the nature of law that have little to do with many of the contemporary debates. |
| My goal here is to focus on these two central features of Lacey’s Hart: his transformation of jurisprudence into a philosophical discipline and his attention to the largely nonadjudicative but importantly systemic features of law. In stressing these themes I hope not only to call attention to the significance of Lacey’s book, but also to offer somewhat of my own retrospective on Hart’s importance. As I will make clear, Lacey helps us see Hart more broadly than many of the current debates that Hart has inspired would have us view him. And in thus grasping the broader Hart we can take a step toward reclaiming some of the profound but now neglected aspects of his work. [ More ] |
Replies in the Harvard Law Review Forum |
Hart and the Concepts of Law
by Ronald Dworkin
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The Demise of Legal Positivism?
by David Dyzenhaus
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Schauer on Hart
by William Twining
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