Chapter 1, Persistent Questions Summary and Analysis

Hart opens The Concept of Law noting that few questions have been asked so often by so many distinguished thinkers as the question, "What is law?" Most statements about law made by history's great minds have been both clearly true and deeply puzzling. The concept of law is simply hard to analyze. For one, it is how to find out whether something is law. A book of statutes is not necessarily comprehensive and neither is the set of ratified legislation or the set of judicial rulings. We have a general idea of the concept of law's role in various contexts: rules, say, forbid certain types of behavior under penalty; other rules specify how to make a will and legislatures sometimes pass laws. While we could simply rest with reminders about how we use the concept, it is...