According to H.L.A. Hart's analysis, to utter an internal legal statement is partly to express an acceptance of a set of norms. This article attempts to defend Hart's conception of internal legal discourse by responding to the following three lines of criticism that can be found in Joseph Raz's writings: (i) that Hart's analysis fails to account for what Raz calls ‘detached legal statements’; (ii) that Hart's deployment of the notion of acceptance in his analysis vitiates his legal positivist project (...) because such acceptance necessarily amounts to moral endorsement; and (iii) that Hart is wrong to assume that normative practices, including discursive legal practices, can be characterized satisfactorily by deploying only descriptive statements. I argue that Hart's theory, or at least a theory along the lines that Hart developed, has sufficient resources to handle satisfactorily these criticisms. His world is a noonday world in which sharply outlined figures, most of them more than a little singular, act in describable ways against perceptible backgrounds. Clifford Geertz, speaking of Sir Edward Evan Evans-Pritchard. (shrink)

Goodness -- Goodness properties -- Expressivism -- Betterness relations -- Virtue/kind properties -- Correctness properties (acts) -- Correctness properties (mental states) -- Reasons-for (mental states) -- Reasons-for (acts) -- On some views about "ought" : relativism, dilemmas, means-ends -- On some views about "ought" : belief, outcomes, epistemic ought -- Directives -- Addendum 1: "Red" and "good" -- Addendum 2: Correctness -- Addendum 3: Reasons -- Addendum 4: Reasoning.

Lays out basics of planning theory of law. Roughly, characterizes the internal point of view as a complex planning intention rather than a response to a recurring coordination problem. We are not responding to such a problem per se, but rather to a cooperation problem - and thus the structure of the attitude or intention must be different. It is officials who have the relevant attitude. Does not reject conventionalism, but argues that the convention is of a different sort than (...) is typically thought. Considers the basic commitment of legal positivism to be a commitment law as social fact. (shrink)

IT is ungenerous to pick holes in The Concept of Law. It is a great work. Its clarity is luminous, and its argument sustained and convincing. Hart is eminently successful in rescuing the concept of law from the Legal Realists, the Positivists, and the Formalists, who attempt to straitjacket it within schemata which are too narrow or too vague to give an adequate elucidation of it. But sometimes Hart is not carried along by his arguments as far as he should. (...) He makes too many concessions to his opponents, and his own account of the law is, in consequence, too formalist, in spite of having himself adduced cogent considerations elsewhere for rejecting the purely formalist line of argument. The rule of recognition, although important, is not fundamental. We should, rather, see law as a social phenomenon, to be distinguished from other social phenomena, but intelligible only in a social context, and not-as lawyers are too ready to suppose-an autonomous discipline which can be explained and understood entirely in its own terms. (shrink)