Back to Hart

Abstract

The essay addresses two different senses of important “problems” for contemporary legal philosophy. In the first case, the “problem” is having forgotten things we learned from H.L.A. Hart, and, partly as a result, encouraging pointless metaphysical inquiries in other directions that take us very far from questions about the nature of law and legal reasoning. In the second case, the “problem” is to attend more carefully to Hart’s views and his philosophical context to think about the problem of theoretical disagreement, and to understand the way in which later commentators have misunderstood his behaviorist (Rylean) analysis of “accepting a rule from an internal point of view.”