Hart, Herbert Lionel Adolphus (1907–93)

H.L.A. Hart, Professor of Jurisprudence at Oxford University, 1952–1968, is an outstanding representative of the analytical approach in jurisprudence and philosophy of law. He restated ‘legal positivism’ in the tradition of Jeremy Bentham and John Austin, differentiating between law’s existence and its moral qualities. But he rejected the Benthamite identification of law with a sovereign’s commands, advancing instead a theory of law as comprising a special, systematically organized, kind of social rules. He did this in a linguistic-analytical style, showing how attention to our way of speaking and thinking about rules can yield new insights into their nature.