Abstract
Sympathetic to Jeremy Bentham's and John Austin's legal positivism, Hart nonetheless identified a number of problems in their analyses. The 'command theory' of law, as Hart saw it, may well resemble common perceptions of the criminal law, but it was inadequate as a full description of law. For Hart, a legal system was best understood as the 'union of primary and secondary rules'. Primary rules imposed obligations – tax law, for example, or the law of negligence imposed on citizens legal obligations: duties to do, or refrain from doing, certain actions. According to jurist Hans Kelsen, there is a science of legal norms. The proper method for analysing legal norms must be objective; it cannot, he argues, refer to other, subjective, criteria: whether the law is good, fair or just, for example. Legal science thus offers a 'pure theory of law', purified from these other, subjective, 'alien elements'. It is in this sense that jurisprudence is 'value free'.
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