Legal History
This Note seeks to demonstrate the ripeness of early American legal periodicals as a subject of further inquiry by reading the American Law Journal (1808–1817), the first American law review, as a reflection of the changing nature of the legal profession at a crucial time in more
Modern constitutional doctrine is full of restrictions on the reasons for which legislatures can enact certain kinds of statutes. Modern American courts, moreover, stand ready to enforce those restrictions by considering a broad array of sources about the hidden purposes behind challenged more
Overbreadth in criminal liability rules, especially in federal law, is abundant and much lamented. Overbreadth is avoidable if it results from normative mistakes about how much conduct to criminalize or from insufficient care to limit open texture in statutes. Social planners cannot so easily more
This Article offers a new reading of Hart’s classic Positivism and the Separation of Law and Morals by rethinking the form of positivism Hart was putting forward. Hart’s separationism was not principally intended as a speculative proposition about the conceptual distinctness more
Lon Fuller, in his response to H.L.A. Hart's 1958 Holmes Lecture and elsewhere, argued that principles of legality—formal principles requiring, for example, that laws be clear, general, and prospective—constitute the “internal morality of law.” This Article contends more
The 1958 debate between Lon Fuller and H.L.A. Hart in the pages of the Harvard Law Review is one of the landmarks of modern jurisprudence. Much of the debate was about the relative merits of Hart’s version of legal positivism and Fuller’s brand of natural law theory, but the more
With a clear and compelling ethical vision, H.L.A. Hart attempts to persuade us that it would be better to see law the positivist way. Much of Lon Fuller’s reply can be read as an equally compelling case for seeing law another way. Both articles are rewarding precisely because they bring more
This Article argues that the historical, moral, and political dimensions of the Hart-Fuller debate deserve much credit for its continuing appeal and should prompt a reconsideration of Hart’s own claims about the universality of analytical jurisprudence. The debate illuminates the sense in more
H.L.A Hart made a famous claim that legal positivism somehow involves a "separation of law and morals." This Article seeks to clarify and assess this claim, contending that Hart's separability thesis should not be confused with the social thesis, the sources thesis, or a more
This Article explores a decision by a German postwar court—the Case of the Grudge Informer—which was central to the 1958 debate between H.L.A. Hart and Lon L. Fuller. The author argues that Fuller’s presentation of the problem in the case is better than Hart’s both as a more