Pojem práva – Hart H. L. A. (2010)

Herbert Lionel Adolphus Hart (1907-1992), a former professor of legal theory at the University of Oxford, is one of the most significant figures in 20th-century legal philosophy, and his book The Concept of Law radically changed traditional views on law and its relationship to morality and politics, the concept of natural law and justice, as well as legal methodology. Apart from Prague-born Hans Kelsen, it would be hard to find another legal theorist whose name has become synonymous with an entire school of legal thought - so-called analytical jurisprudence. Since the book The Concept of Law was first published in 1961, it has inspired several generations of lawyers, philosophers, and political scientists, and it can be said without exaggeration that the history of Anglo-American legal philosophy and theory over the last nearly five decades has largely been a period of critical engagement with Hart's conception of law as a system of primary and secondary rules. Hart's famous debates with American legal theorist Lon L. Fuller, in which the dispute between positive and natural law was revitalized in an original way, have been crucial for such diverse schools of legal thought as represented by the works of Ronald Dworkin, Joseph Raz, or Neil MacCormick.