H. L. A. Hart | |
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| Born | Herbert Lionel Adolphus Hart (1907-07-18)18 July 1907 Harrogate, England |
| Died | 19 December 1992(1992-12-19) (aged 85) Oxford, England |
| Title | Principal of Brasenose College, Oxford (1973–1978) |
| Spouse | |
| Academic background | |
| Alma mater | New College, Oxford |
| Influences | |
| Academic work | |
| Discipline | |
| Sub-discipline | |
| School or tradition | |
| Institutions | |
| Doctoral students | |
| Notable students | Peter Hacker |
| Notable works | The Concept of Law (1961) |
| Notable ideas |
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| Influenced | |
Herbert Lionel Adolphus HartFBA (/hɑːrt/; 18 July 1907 – 19 December 1992) was a Britishlegal philosopher. One of the most influential legal theorists of the 20th century, he was instrumental in the development of the theory oflegal positivism, which was popularised by his book,The Concept of Law.[2][3] Hart's contributions focused on the nature of law, the relationship between law and morality, and the analysis of legal rules and systems, introducing concepts such as the "rule of recognition" that have shaped modern legal thought.
Born in Harrogate, England, Hart received a first class honours degree in classical studies fromNew College, Oxford, before qualifying at the English bar. DuringWorld War II, Hart served in British intelligence, working with figures such asAlan Turing andDick White. Following the war, Hart transitioned to academia, becomingProfessor of Jurisprudence at the University of Oxford in 1952, a position he held until 1969.
In addition to his legal positivism, Hart engaged in important debates on the role of law in society, most famously withPatrick Devlin, Baron Devlin over the enforcement of morality through law, and with his successor at Oxford,Ronald Dworkin, on the nature of legal interpretation. Hart's influence extended beyond his own work, mentoring legal thinkers the likes ofJoseph Raz,John Finnis,Ronald Dworkin.
Herbert Lionel Adolphus Hart was born on 18 July 1907,[4] the son of Rose Samson Hart and Simeon Hart, inHarrogate,[5] to which his parents had moved from theEast End of London. His father was aJewish tailor of German and Polish origin; his mother, of Polish origin, daughter of successful retailers in the clothing trade, handled customer relations and the finances of their firm. Hart had three siblings, two elder brothers, Albert (1901) and Reggie (1902) and a younger sister, Sybil (1915)
Hart was educated atCheltenham College,Bradford Grammar School and atNew College, Oxford. He took a first inclassical greats in 1929.[6] Hart became abarrister and practised successfully at the Chancery Bar from 1932 to 1940. He was good friends withRichard Wilberforce,Douglas Jay, andChristopher Cox, among others. He received a Harmsworth Scholarship to theMiddle Temple and also wrote literary journalism for the periodicalJohn O'London's Weekly.[6]
During theSecond World War, Hart worked withMI5, a division of British military intelligence concerned with unearthing spies who had penetrated Britain, where he renewed Oxford friendships including working with the philosophersGilbert Ryle andStuart Hampshire. He worked closely withDick White, later head of MI5 and then ofMI6. Hart worked atBletchley Park and was a colleague of the mathematician and codebreakerAlan Turing.[7]
Hart's war work took him on occasion to MI5 offices atBlenheim Palace, family home of theDukes of Marlborough and the place whereWinston Churchill had been born.[citation needed] He enjoyed telling the story that there he was able to read the diaries ofSarah Churchill, Duchess of Marlborough, wife of the founder of the dynastyJohn Churchill, 1st Duke of Marlborough. Hart's wit and humanity are demonstrated by the fact that he particularly enjoyed the passage where Sarah reports that John had been away for a long time, had arrived suddenly, and "enjoyed me straight way in his boots". Another incident at Blenheim that Hart enjoyed recounting was that he shared an office with one of the famous Cambridge spies,Anthony Blunt, a fellow member of MI5. Hart wondered which of the papers on his desk Blunt had managed to read and to pass on to his Soviet controllers.
Hart did not return to his legal practice after the war, preferring instead to accept the offer of a teaching fellowship (in philosophy, not law) at New College, Oxford. Hart citesJ. L. Austin as particularly influential during this time.[6] The two jointly taught from 1948 a seminar on 'Legal and Moral Responsibility'. Among Hart's publications at this time were the essays 'A Logician's Fairytale', 'Is There Knowledge by Acquaintance?', 'Law and Fact' and 'The Ascription of Responsibility and Rights'.
In 1952, Hart was electedProfessor of Jurisprudence at Oxford and was a fellow atUniversity College, Oxford, from 1952 to 1973.[8] It was in the summer of that year that he began writing his most famous book,The Concept of Law, though it was not published until 1961. In the interim, he published another major work,Causation in the Law (with Tony Honoré) (1959). He was president of theAristotelian Society from 1959 to 1960. He gave the 1962 Master-Mind Lecture.[9]
Hart marriedJenifer Fischer Williams, a civil servant, later a senior civil servant, in the Home Office and, still later, Oxford historian atSt Anne's College (specialising in the history of the police).[10] Jenifer Hart was, for some years in the mid-1930s and fading out totally by decade's end, a 'sleeper' member of theCommunist Party of Great Britain. Three decades later she was interviewed byPeter Wright as having been in a position to have passed information to the Soviets, and to Wright, MI5's official spy hunter, she explained her situation; Wright took no action. In fact her work as civil servant was in fields such as family policy and so would have been of no interest to the Soviets.[11] The person who recruited her,Bernard Floud, interviewed by Wright shortly after, maintained that he was unable to remember ever having done so. Nor was her husband in a position to convey to her information of use, despite vague newspaper suggestions, given the sharp separation of his work from that of foreign affairs and its focus on German spies and British turncoats rather than on matters related to the Soviet ally. In fact, Hart was anticommunist.
The marriage contained "incompatible personalities", though it lasted right to the end of their lives and gave joy to both at times. Hart did joke with his daughter at one point, however, that "[t]he trouble with this marriage is that one of us doesn't like sex and the other doesn't like food",[12] and according to Hart's biographer, LSE law professor Nicola Lacey, Hart was, by his own account, a "suppressed homosexual".[13] Jenifer Hart was believed by her contemporaries to have had an affair of long duration withIsaiah Berlin, a close friend of Hart's. In 1998, Jenifer Hart publishedAsk Me No More: An Autobiography. The Harts had four children, including, late in life, a son who was disabled, the umbilical cord wrapped around his neck having deprived his brain of oxygen.
Hart's granddaughterMojo Mathers became New Zealand's first deaf Member of Parliament in 2011.[14]
There is a description of the Harts' household by the writer on religionKaren Armstrong, who lodged with them for a time to help take care of their disabled son. The description appears in her bookThe Spiral Staircase.[15]
Hart retired from the Chair of Jurisprudence in 1969 and was succeeded byRonald Dworkin. He subsequently became principal ofBrasenose College, Oxford.
Hart died in Oxford on 19 December 1992, aged 85.[4] He is buried there inWolvercote Cemetery, which also containsIsaiah Berlin's grave.
Many of Hart's former students have become important legal, moral, and political philosophers, includingBrian Barry,Ronald Dworkin,John Finnis,John Gardner,Kent Greenawalt,Peter Hacker,David Hodgson,Neil MacCormick,Joseph Raz,Chin Liew Ten andWilliam Twining. Hart also had a strong influence on the youngJohn Rawls in the 1950s, when Rawls was a visiting scholar at Oxford shortly after finishing his PhD.
Hart strongly influenced the application of methods in his version of Anglo-American positive law to jurisprudence and thephilosophy of law in the English-speaking world. Influenced byJohn Austin,Ludwig Wittgenstein andHans Kelsen, 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 ofJeremy Bentham, the great English legal, political, and moral philosopher. Hart's conception of law had parallels to thePure Theory of Law formulated by Austrian legal philosopherHans Kelsen, though Hart rejected several distinctive features of Kelsen's theory.
Significant in the differences between Hart and Kelsen was the emphasis on the British version of positive law theory which Hart was defending as opposed to the Continental version of positive law theory which Kelsen was defending. This was studied in the University of Toronto Law Journal in an article titled "Leaving the Hart-Dworkin Debate" which maintained that Hart insisted in his bookThe Concept of Law on the expansive reading of positive law theory to include philosophical and sociological domains of assessment rather than the more focused attention of Kelsen who considered Continental positive law theory as more limited to the domain of jurisprudence itself.[16]
Hart drew, among others, onGlanville Williams who had demonstrated his legal philosophy in a five-part article, "Language and the Law" and in 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 theorists could please themselves, but had no right to dictate to others.
This approach was to be refined and developed by Hart in the last chapter ofThe Concept of Law (1961), which showed how the use in respect of different social phenomena of an abstract word likelaw reflected the fact that these phenomena each shared, without necessarily all possessing 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".[17]
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Hart's most famous work isThe 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 atHarvard Law School.The Concept of Law developed a sophisticated view of legal positivism. Among the many ideas developed in this book are:
WithTony Honoré, Hart wrote and publishedCausation in the Law (1959, second edition 1985), which is regarded as one of the important academic discussions of causation in the legal context. The early chapters deal philosophically with the concept of cause and are clearly the work of Hart, while later chapters deal with individual cases in English law and are clearly his co-author's.
As a result of his famous debate (Hart–Devlin debate) withPatrick Devlin, Baron Devlin, on the role of the criminal law in enforcing moral norms, Hart wroteLaw, Liberty and Morality (1963), which consisted of three lectures he gave atStanford University. He also wroteThe Morality of the Criminal Law (1965). Hart said that he believed Devlin's view of Mill's harm principle as it related to the decriminalisation of homosexuality was "perverse".[18] He later stated that he believed the reforms to the law regarding homosexuality that followed theWolfenden report "didn't go far enough". Despite this, Hart reported later that he got on well personally with Devlin.[6]
Hart gave lectures to the Labour Party on closing tax loopholes which were being used by the "super-rich". Hart considered himself to be "on the Left, the non-communist Left", and expressed animosity towardsMargaret Thatcher.[6]
| Academic offices | ||
|---|---|---|
| Preceded by | Professor of Jurisprudence at the University of Oxford 1952–1968 | Succeeded by |
| Preceded by | Principal of Brasenose College, Oxford 1973–1978 | Succeeded by |
| Professional and academic associations | ||
| Preceded by | President of theAristotelian Society 1959–1960 | Succeeded by |
| Preceded by | Master-Mind Lecturer 1962 | Succeeded by |
