Recommended Citation

When H.L.A. Hart published his very influential Concept of Law in 1961, he was seeking to revive an intellectual tradition that began with Jeremy Bentham and Thomas Hobbes. Their efforts to explain law were based on views we would now call naturalistic or positivistic. In the words of Bentham, the ultimate aim of such approaches was ‘to extend the experimental method of reasoning from the physical branch to the moral ’ (quoted in Schofield, 1991, p. 59), and this meant (as it meant to all good scientists) ‘not letting value judgments into their analyses ’ (Hardin, 2007, p. 2, referring to the work of Hobbes and Hume). Hence the need to separate the question what the law was, of identifying the object of inquiry, from the question what it should be. Thu