- Also called:
- jurisprudence
Hans Kelsen
Kelsen, a fierce opponent of natural-law theories, identified the central problem of the philosophy of law as how to explain the normative force of law—i.e., law’s claim to rightfully tell people what they ought to do (such that, for example, they have an obligation of obedience to the law). (Kelsen also thought that law’s commands are directed most fundamentally at officials of the legal system, such as judges, telling them what sanctions to apply to citizens on the basis of the latter’s conduct.) He rejected the idea that law’s normative force could derive from its moral status: like all theorists in the legal-positivist tradition, he acknowledged that laws could fail to be morally justified. But how then to explain the difference between, for example, threats of brute force (“Hand over the money, or I will shoot you”) and legal demands?
When a judge hears a case and decides for the plaintiff, ordering the defendant to pay monetary damages, the judge’s authority to do so derives from rules of the legal system that authorize the judge to render such decisions, subject to various procedural and substantive constraints enacted by a legislature. But what gives those rules their authority? Perhaps it is the constitution, the foundational document of a legal system, which establishes a legislature entitled to enact procedural and substantive rules governing court decisions and specifies who can exercise the power of a judge and under what circumstances. But then what gives the constitution the right to do that? An infinite regress now looms if one posits some further authority-granting source.
Kelsen was strongly influenced by Neo-Kantian tendencies in German-speaking philosophy in the early 20th century and was accordingly attracted to the “transcendental” strategy of argument that Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) made famous: given the existence of some undisputed phenomenon, one is entitled to infer or presuppose the existence of whatever is needed to explain it. Given the undisputed fact that law claims authority, the only way to avoid an infinite regress is to assume that the authority of the foundational document or constitution derives from a “basic norm” (Grundnorm in German), the substance of which is something like “the constitution is to be obeyed.”
Kelsen defended a “pure theory” of law—that is, one that purports to explain law’s normativity without invoking any empirical facts about people’s beliefs, attitudes, or behaviour. A fatal problem with transcendental arguments, however, is that they are vulnerable to objections based on denying the reality of what the theory purports to explain: the laws do claim authority, but perhaps that authority is merely apparent, simply unreal. Hart’s version of legal positivism eschewed transcendental arguments but took seriously the same basic problem that animated Kelsen’s theory of law.
H.L.A. Hart
Hart, who spent his academic career at the University of Oxford, the centre of the “ordinary language” movement associated with J.L. Austin (1911–60) and Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951), framed his theory as an attempt to understand the ordinary concept of law—the concept familiar to any citizen of an advanced modern legal system. Hart criticized the command theories of law associated with John Austin and Bentham because of their failure to make sense of all those familiar instances of laws that confer legal powers on individuals rather than commanding them to abstain from particular conduct on pain of punishment. A criminal prohibition on murder may be a command backed by a threat of sanction, but a law authorizing an individual to make a valid will disposing of his property after his death is not. Power-conferring rules are central features of legal systems, and command theories, Hart contended, cannot explain them.
The problem, Hart thought, went farther. The familiar idea that all law essentially involves sanctions is also mistaken, whether in the form of Austin’s view that every law is a command backed by a threat of punishment or of Kelsen’s view that laws tell officials when to sanction citizens. The problem, according to Hart, is that one typically thinks of law as, at least sometimes, imposing obligations to act (or not to act) in certain ways. If law is essentially about threats, however, then talk of having an obligation makes no sense: no one thinks, after all, that one has an obligation to hand over one’s money to a robber, even if doing so would be prudent in the circumstances. Hart, in short, agreed with Kelsen that the law claims a kind of authority, a right to tell people what they ought (or ought not) to do, not simply what they must (or must not) do on pain of penalty.
Hart’s solution to the problem that Kelsen identified is, however, very different. Hart claimed that wherever a legal system exists, there also exists a “rule of recognition” that specifies the criteria of legal validity that any rule must satisfy in order to count as a rule of that legal system. But a rule of recognition is not a Grundnorm, a transcendental presupposition of legal thought. It is rather a complicated psychosocial phenomenon (an instance of what Hart called a “social rule”) whose existence and content are established by the sociological fact that officials of the legal system converge on certain criteria of legal validity and by the psychological fact that such officials view those criteria as obligatory. Thus, the U.S. Constitution is a source of legal authority in the U.S. legal system because almost all judges treat constitutionality as a criterion of legal validity (a law that is unconstitutional is not enforced by the courts) and act and talk as if they have an obligation to do precisely that.
Hart’s positivist theory of law is, then, “impure”: contrary to Kelsen, Hart claimed that the normative character of law can be explained in terms of complicated facts about the behaviour and attitudes of officials of the legal system, primarily judges. To be sure, Hart agreed with Kelsen that laws may be morally unjustified, but, unlike Kelsen, he thought that the existence of law is, fundamentally, dependent on nothing more than the conventional practices of judges. If judges in the United States were to stop treating the Constitution as a criterion of legal validity, then it would cease to be such.