Hart's Expressivism and His Benthamite Project

Abstract:     
The paper argues that H.L.A. Hart conceived internal legal statements as normative statements, and more particularly that he developed an expressivist analysis of internal legal statements that bears strong influences of his predecessors and contemporaries who advocated expressivist analyses of ethical statements. It also takes up Ronald Dworkin’s influential criticism of Hart’s legal theory, according to which Hart cannot account for some genuine legal disagreements. Dworkin’s criticism is founded on a mischaracterization of Hart’s analysis as a descriptivist analysis of the sort that both G.E. Moore and the early emotivists criticized. In his expressivist analysis Hart had an account of internal legal statements that was designed to explain normative disagreements.

Number of Pages in PDF File: 49

working papers series