Hart's most famous work is The Concept of Law, first published in 1961, and with a second edition (including a new postscript) published posthumously in 1994. The book emerged from a set of lectures that Hart began to deliver in 1952, and it is presaged by his Holmes lecture, Positivism and the Separation of Law and Morals delivered at Harvard Law School. The Concept of Law developed a sophisticated view of legal positivism. Among the many ideas developed in this book are:
- A critique of John Austin's theory that law is the command of the sovereign backed by the threat of punishment.
- A distinction between primary and secondary legal rules, where a primary rule governs conduct and a secondary rule allows the creation, alteration, or extinction of primary rules.
- A distinction between the internal and external points of view of law and rules, close to (and influenced by) Max Weber's distinction between the sociological and the legal perspectives upon law.
- The idea of the Rule of Recognition, a social rule that differentiates between those norms that have the authority of law and those that do not.
- A late reply (published as a postscript to the second edition) to Ronald Dworkin, who criticized legal positivism in Taking Rights Seriously (1977), A Matter of Principle (1985) and Law's Empire (1986).
Read more about this topic: H. L. A. Hart
Famous quotes containing the word concept:
“The new concept of the child as equal and the new integration of children into adult life has helped bring about a gradual but certain erosion of these boundaries that once separated the world of children from the word of adults, boundaries that allowed adults to treat children differently than they treated other adults because they understood that children are different.”
—Marie Winn (20th century)