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

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.