Fuller, Lon Louvois (1902–78)

Lon Louvois Fuller was a leading US legal philosopher and contracts lawyer who in his controversies with H.L.A. Hart and with US ‘legal realists’ advanced a version of ‘procedural natural law’ deriving an ‘inner morality of law’ from the formal properties of law. At the same time, through his insistence that legal interpretation must always consider the essentially purposive character of legal activity, he forms an intellectual bridge between earlier pragmatist accounts of law and the late twentieth-century interpretivist approach associated particularly with Ronald Dworkin.