Legal Theory and the Obligation of a Judge: The Hart/Dworkin Dispute

Authors

E. Philip Soper, University of Michigan Law SchoolFollow

Abstract

This article offers a review of the Hart-Dworkin dispute and a qualified defense of the positivist's model against Dworkin's attack. The defense is cast primarily in the form of the second possible response to a descriptive theory: Dworkin's attack fails, I suggest, because it involves descriptive claims that can be accommodated to the positivist's conceptual theory regardless of one's view about the plausibility of those claims.

Recommended Citation

E. P. Soper, Legal Theory and the Obligation of a Judge: The Hart/Dworkin Dispute, 75 Mich. L. Rev. 473 (1977).
Available at: https://repository.law.umich.edu/mlr/vol75/iss3/2