Ryu and Sewell on The Hart-Dworkin Debate

Angelo Ryu and Trenton Sewell, both of the University of Oxford, have published The Hart-Dworkin Debate.

This encyclopedia entry discusses the Hart-Dworkin debate, understood as the literature developed around the viability of Hartian positivism in light of the arguments Dworkin either laid out or inspired. The focus is on two arguments: the argument from principles and the argument from theoretical disagreement. First, can Hart adequately account for the role of principles in law? The entry considers three variants of this argument. Second, can Hart adequately account for the existence of law in practices whose officials disagree on why certain empirical facts make a given legal proposition true? The entry considers both semantic and non-semantic variants of this argument.

Download the entry from SSRN at the link.