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Hart's 'Postscript' And The Nature Of Legal Theory, Matteo Mattioni

Bocconi Legal Papers

This paper analyses the nature of Herbert L. A. Hart’s legal theory – that is the meta-cognitive aspect of his analytical jurisprudence – with reference to his last, unfinished writing (the Postscript to his Concept of Law, posthumously published in 1994) and to the recent, doubtful reply coming from the Postscript’s main addressee, the American philosopher Ronald Dworkin. After a brief – but not cursory – summation of the essential features of Hart’s and Dworkin’s legal theories and an overview of the debate that continued between the two up to the late 1980s, the present work delves into the Postscript’s …