Abstract

In the second section of Chapter V of The concept of law, Hart lays down the concept of legal obligation throughout a critique of the concept of obligation in John Austin’s predictive theory. The critique aims at the core domain of this theory, which occupies the major part of the section, and shows how wrong it is to describe the legal obligation in terms of commands and habits of obedience. At the end of this section, Hart introduces the concepts of internal and external point of view, in order to criticize the methodological model used by the predictive theory – the great responsible for the mistakes of Austin’s account. The following paper makes a review of the “debate” between both theories and, at the end, it tries to demonstrate how the introduction of Hart’s new conceptions (internal and external points of view) is done to avoid the mistakes occurred in Austin’s predictive theory.