LAW214 Lecture Notes - Lecture 3: Behaviorism, Social Fact, Black Letter Law

• School: Macquarie University
• Department: Law/Law Participation and Community Engagement
• Course: LAW214
• Professor: Lukas Opacic

Document Summary

Hart offers a more sophisticated account of the nature of law than austin. Hart considers a conceptual condition of the existence of law: it is impossible to explain law without making reference to the internalisation of legal rules by officials, or their voluntary cooperation in maintaining the rules. Hart is a positivist; he wishes to give an account of the law that makes its use of normative language intelligible while preserving the conceptual independence of law from morality. Officials must internalise the rules of law, they do not have to believe that the rules are morally legitimate. Hart gives a distinctively philosophical slant to inquiries into the nature of law, which up until that point had been largely a-theoretical and undertaken by legal scholars who had little knowledge of philosophy as a professional discipline. Rules prescribe conduct, rather than describing it, and the rules are therefore expressed in normative vocabulary, such as ought", must", should", right" and.