Hart's Positivism and Dworkin's Initial Objections

Herbert Lionel Adolphus Hart's version of legal positivism, developed in The Concept of Law and refined in the Postscript to the second edition, has been the centerpiece in the development of contemporary legal positivism as well as the focal point of the strongest and most interesting objections to it in the philosophy of law. Hart's own argument builds on the work of positivists who preceded him. In particular, Hart seeks to address and correct the main shortcomings he identifies in the theories of law offered by John Austin and Hans Kelsen. Both Austin and Kelsen thought that laws are a distinguishable subset of norms, identifiable by their possession of an intrinsic and necessary property. In other words, they saw the fundamental project of jurisprudence...