Abstract

H. L. A. Hart is one of the dominant personalities of twentieth-century legal philosophy. After his election to the Oxford chair of jurisprudence in 1953, numerous essays of great range and conceptual power flowed from his pen. But in no area might his work be deemed more important than his success in advancing the anti-natural law line that notions of morality are unhelpful in, indeed are positively deadly for, careful accurate analytical study of law. This position may be captured in short compass by borrowing the celebrated slogan Hart draws from John Austin: the existence of law is one thing; its merit or demerit is another. ;Yet, because Hart is so careful to develop arguments for a theory of law which have normative impact, as well as descriptive and conceptual power, important lines of divide that are typically taken to separate positivists from natural lawyers are strangely blurred. The theme advanced in this essay is that upon careful exploration of those standardized positivist/natural lawyer boundaries frequently assumed to exist, one discovers that on Hart's own leading they have in fact quite faded away. In reconstructed form, a Hartian legal theory can be seen as a variant natural law position. ;The three major sections of the dissertation respectively take up the debates concerning legal theories of adjudication , obligation , and the content of law . Although the development of a Hartian theory is shown to be preferred to alternatives , it does not escape criticism. Indeed, the Hartian line seems seriously incomplete with regards to the notion of legal obligation and the role of moral commitments to internal viewpoints of law and law's possible contents. Thus, the conclusion of each part is that a more complete Hartian theory requires certain elaborations. In turn, these elaborations or reconstructions of a Hartian theory chip away more and more of the positivistic separation thesis until it crumbles and is gone. In the end, Hartian law is seen to unfold as natural law