A Life of H.L.A. Hart: The Nightmare and the Noble Dream

Citation

Lacey, N. (2004). A Life of H.L.A. Hart: The Nightmare and the Noble Dream. Oxford University Press.

Chapter Summary

Context and Argument

Nicola Lacey's biography follows H. L. A. Hart (born 1907), the Oxford professor of jurisprudence whose The Concept of Law reshaped the philosophy of law in English-speaking universities. Lacey draws on Hart's unpublished diaries and letters, and on interviews, to show a man who was outwardly successful but troubled by doubts about his intellectual abilities, his sexual identity and his capacity for close relationships. The book argues that Hart's ideas and the course of his career cannot be separated from that inner life or from the postwar Oxford in which he worked, and it assesses his contribution to legal philosophy and to public debate in Britain on abortion, homosexuality and capital punishment. The final chapter takes the book's subtitle as its title.

The book has a note on approach and sources, an introduction, thirteen chapters in four parts, notes, bibliographies of Hart's writings and of other authors, a list of interviewees and biographical details on people who appear in it.

Introduction: An Outsider on the Inside

The introduction sets out the paradox of a figure at the centre of Oxford's establishment who regarded himself as an outsider, and it explains how the biography uses the private papers.

Part I: North and South

Chapter 1, Harrogate, Cheltenham, Bradford, covers Hart's origins in Yorkshire as the child of second-generation Jewish immigrants and his schooling. Chapter 2, An Oxford Scholar, deals with his time as a scholarship student at Oxford, and Chapter 3, Success Snatched from Defeat: London and the Bar, with his years practising as a barrister (1932–40), during which he kept up his study of philosophy.

Part II: Change and Continuity

Chapter 4, Jenifer, is devoted to his marriage to Jenifer Williams, a high-ranking civil servant and later an Oxford academic, and to the strains that included a false press allegation that she had been a Russian spy. Chapter 5, From the Inns of Court to Military Intelligence: MI5, Marriage, and Fatherhood, covers his wartime work at MI5, where philosopher colleagues stimulated his interest. Chapter 6, Oxford from the Other Side of the Fence, follows his return to Oxford after the war as a philosophy fellow.

Part III: The Golden Age

Chapter 7, Selling Philosophy to the Lawyers: The Chair of Jurisprudence, describes how Hart, as Professor of Jurisprudence, brought the new linguistic philosophy to legal thought. Chapter 8, American Jurisprudence through English Eyes: Harvard 1956–7, covers his time at Harvard. Chapter 9, Law in the Perspective of Philosophy: Causation in Law, The Concept of Law, takes up his two major books of the period. Chapter 10, West and East, California and Israel: Law, Liberty, and Morality; Kelsen Visited; The Morality of the Criminal Law, ranges over his travels and his public debate on law and morality. Chapter 11, Discipline, Punishment, and Responsibility, deals with his work on those themes.

Part IV: After the Chair

Chapter 12, Old Turks and Young Fogeys: Bentham and Brasenose, takes up his later career, including his work on Bentham and his headship of Brasenose College. Chapter 13, The Nightmare and the Noble Dream, draws the life and the work together.

Key Concepts

Parts I and II: Making of a Scholar

• Outsider and insider: the biography's organising tension, an Oxford establishment figure who felt himself an outsider.
• Philosophy and practice: the move from the Bar through wartime intelligence work to academic philosophy.

Part III: The Golden Age

• Concept of law: Hart's attempt to elucidate a concept of law relevant to all forms of law, combining Bentham and Austin with the new linguistic philosophy of J. L. Austin and Wittgenstein.
• Law, liberty and morality: his influence on British thinking in the 1960s on abortion, the legalisation of homosexuality and capital punishment.

Part IV: Legacy

• Life and ideas together: Lacey's assessment of the origins of Hart's ideas and of his overall contribution.

Critical Analysis

Strengths

• New primary material. Lacey's use of Hart's previously unpublished diaries and letters, along with interviews, gives the book access to a private side that colleagues had not suspected; reviewers including Samantha Besson (German Law Journal) and Jeremy Waldron, quoted on the Booktopia listing, stress this.
• Clear on ideas. Reviews quoted on the same listing (the TLS, London Review of Books, Waldron) praise Lacey's explanation of Hart's arguments and the objections to them alongside the narrative.
• A picture of postwar Oxford. Jonathan Derbyshire in the Financial Times magazine (February 2006) singled out her portrait of the postwar university and its academic politics.
• Apparatus for study. Bibliographies of Hart's writings, a list of interviewees and biographical notes on figures in the book make it a base for further research.

Limitations

• Not a primer on Hart's theory. The book assesses the ideas but is organised by life, so readers who want a systematic account of The Concept of Law need Hart's own text or a jurisprudence textbook.
• Dense with Oxford detail. The narrative follows many colleagues and institutions, and its length (about 420 pages) may deter those wanting a quick sketch.

Where It Fits in the Course

In the jurisprudence course this is the only biography among the listed books. Simmonds's Central Issues in Jurisprudence and Wacks's Philosophy of Law: A Very Short Introduction explain the theories directly, and Fuller's The Case of the Speluncean Explorers is a short classic debate about judicial philosophy. The animal-rights books by Regan and the Singer and Regan anthology belong to applied moral philosophy, and An-Na'im's book to the relationship between religious and state law.

Read it after an introduction to legal positivism, so that references to Hart's debates with Devlin and Fuller are familiar, or alongside The Concept of Law to see the context of its writing.

How to Use This Book

It is for readers who already know the outline of Hart's theory and want to see how it arose. No technical legal knowledge is needed beyond that, since the narrative is explanatory.

A selective route: the introduction, then Chapters 7 to 10 on the chair, Harvard, the major books and the debates, then Chapter 13. Read Parts I and II for background on the person, and Chapter 12 for Bentham and the late career. Keep a note of passages linking Hart's life with particular arguments, and test each against his own writing before accepting the link.