H. L. A. Hart - Philosophical Method

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. Hart drew on Glanville Williams: Glanville Williams demonstrated his skill as a legal philosopher in a five-part article, ‘Language and the Law’ and a paper, ‘International Law and the Controversy concerning the word “Law”. In the paper on international law, he sharply attacked the many jurists and international lawyers who had debated whether international law was ‘really’ law. They had been wasting everyone's time, for the question was not a factual one, the many differences between municipal and international law being undeniable, but was simply one of conventional verbal usage, about which individual the¬orists could please themselves, but had no right to dictate to others. This approach was to be refined and developed by H. L. A. Hart in the last chapter of The Concept of Law (1961) which showed how the use in respect of different social phenomena of an abstract word like “law” reflected the fact that these phenomena each shared, without necessarily all possess¬ing in common, some distinctive features. Glanville had himself said as much when editing a student text on jurisprudence and he had adopted essentially the same approach to ‘The Definition of Crime’ .