H. L. A. Hart

"Herbert Hart" redirects here. For the cricketer, see Herbert Hart (cricketer).

Herbert Lionel Adolphus Hart

Full name	Herbert Lionel Adolphus Hart
Born	18 July 1907 Harrogate, England
Died	19 December 1992 Oxford, England
Era	20th-century philosophy
Region	Western Philosophers
School	Analytic
Main interests	Jurisprudence, legal positivism, linguistic philosophy, political philosophy, liberalism, utilitarianism
Influenced by Jeremy Bentham, John Austin, John Stuart Mill, J.L. Austin, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Hans Kelsen, Max Weber
Influenced Ronald Dworkin, John Rawls, Joseph Raz, John Finnis, W.J. Waluchow, Leslie Green, Jeremy Waldron, Neil MacCormick, Brian Barry, Stephen Guest

Herbert Lionel Adolphus Hart (18 July 1907 – 19 December 1992) was an influential legal philosopher of the 20th century. He was Professor of Jurisprudence at Oxford University and the Principal of Brasenose College, Oxford. He wrote The Concept of Law.

Biographical sketch

Hart was born in 1907, the son of a prosperous Jewish tailor of German and Polish origin. Educated at Cheltenham College, Bradford Grammar School and at New College, Oxford, Hart took an outstanding First in Classical Greats in 1929.

He became a Barrister and practised successfully at the Chancery Bar from 1932 to 1940 and was good friends with Richard (later Lord) Wilberforce.

During World War II, Hart worked with MI5, a division of British military intelligence, where he renewed Oxford friendships. He did not return to his legal practice after the War, preferring instead to accept the offer of a teaching fellowship (in philosophy, not Law) at New College, Oxford.

In 1952, he was elected Professor of Jurisprudence at Oxford. He retired from the Chair in 1969 and was succeeded by Ronald Dworkin. He was president of the Aristotelian Society from 1959 to 1960.

Hart married Jenifer Williams, a senior civil servant in the Home Office and, later, Oxford historian at St Anne's College (specializing in the history of the police). Jenifer Hart, a 'sleeper' member of the Communist Party in the 1930s, later came under suspicion of having passed information to the Soviets. The Harts had four children, including a son who was disabled. The marriage contained "incompatible personalities", and Hart confessed to his daughter that "[t]he trouble with this marriage is that one of us doesn't like sex and the other doesn't like food." Jenifer Hart was believed by her contemporaries to have had an affair of long duration with Isaiah Berlin, a close friend of Hart's. Jenifer published her memoirs under the title Ask Me No More in 1998.

There is a description of their household by the writer on religion Karen Armstrong, who lodged with them for a time, in her book The Spiral Staircase.

Hart's students

Many of Hart's former students became important legal, moral, and political philosophers, including Brian Barry, John Finnis, Kent Greenawalt, Neil MacCormick, Joseph Raz, Chin Liew Ten, W. J. Waluchow, and Ronald Dworkin. Hart also had a strong influence on the young John Rawls in the 1950s, when Rawls was a visiting scholar at Oxford shortly after finishing his PhD.

Philosophical method

Hart revolutionized the methods of jurisprudence and the philosophy of law in the English-speaking world. Influenced by John Austin and Ludwig Wittgenstein, Hart brought the tools of analytic, and especially linguistic, philosophy to bear on the central problems of legal theory. Hart's method combined the careful analysis of twentieth-century analytic philosophy with the jurisprudential tradition of Jeremy Bentham, the great English legal, political, and moral philosopher. Hart's conception of law had parallels to the Pure Theory of Law formulated by Austrian legal philosopher Hans Kelsen, though Hart rejected several distinctive features of Kelsen's theory.^{[citation needed]}

The Concept of Law

Hart's most famous work is The Concept of Law, first published in 1961, and with a second edition (including a new postscript) published posthumously in 1994. The book emerged from a set of lectures that Hart began to deliver in 1952, and it is presaged by his Holmes lecture, Positivism and the Separation of Law and Morals delivered at Harvard Law School. The Concept of Law developed a sophisticated view of legal positivism. Among the many ideas developed in this book are:

• A critique of John Austin's theory that law is the command of the sovereign backed by the threat of punishment.
• A distinction between primary and secondary legal rules, where a primary rule governs conduct and a secondary rule allows of the creation, alteration, or extinction of primary rules.
• A distinction between the internal and external points of view of law and rules, close to (and influenced by) Max Weber's distinction between the sociological and the legal perspectives upon law.
• The idea of the Rule of Recognition, a social rule that differentiates between those norms that have the authority of law and those that do not.
• A late reply (published as a postscript to the second edition) to Ronald Dworkin, who criticized legal positivism in Taking Rights Seriously (1977), A Matter of Principle (1985) and Law's Empire (1986).

Other work

With Tony Honoré, Hart wrote Causation in the Law (1959, second edition 1985), which is regarded as one of the important academic discussions of Causation in the legal context. As a result of his famous debate with Patrick Devlin, Baron Devlin on the role of the criminal law in enforcing moral norms, Hart wrote Law, Liberty and Morality (1963) and The Morality of the Criminal Law (1965). Hart's work on the relationship between law and morality had a significant effect on the law in the UK, helping bring about the decriminalization of homosexuality, among other things.

Writings

• "The Ascription of Responsibility and Rights". Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 1949.
• Definition and Theory in Jurisprudence (1953)
• Causation in the Law (with Tony Honoré) (1959)
• The Concept of Law Oxford: Oxford University Press: 1961.
• Law, Liberty and Morality (1963)
• The Morality of the Criminal Law (1964)
• Punishment and Responsibility (1968)
• Essays on Bentham: Studies in Jurisprudence and Political Theory (1982)
• Essays in Jurisprudence and Philosophy (1983)

Festschrift

• Law, Morality, and Society: Essays in Honour of H. L. A. Hart, edited by P. M. S. Hacker and Joseph Raz (1977)

See also

• Hart-Dworkin debate
• Hart-Fuller debate (Lon Fuller)
• Legal interpretivism
• Legal positivism
• Natural law
• Philosophy of law

Bibliography

• Nicola Lacey A Life of H. L. A. Hart: The Nightmare and the Noble Dream, Oxford University Press: 2004 (ISBN 0-19-927497-5).
• Frederick Schauer "(Re)Taking Hart," 119 Harv. L. Rev. 852 (2006) (reviewing Lacey, "A Life of H. L. A. Hart").
• Karen Armstrong The Spiral Staircase, Harper Collins, 2004 (ISBN 0-00-712228-4)
• Carlin Romano "A Philosopher's Humanity", Chronicle of Higher Education vol. 51 (2005) (reviewing Lacey, "A Life of H. L. A. Hart") link

External links

• A biography
• Short Biography by Tony Honoré
• A Life of HLA Hart: The Nightmare and the Noble Dream

Academic offices
Preceded by Noel Frederick Hall	Principal of Brasenose College, Oxford 1973–1978	Succeeded by John Keiran Barry Moylan Nicholas