H.L.A. Hart’s Lost Essay on Policies, Principles, and Adjudication

Abstract

This introductory essay accompanies the publication of H.L.A. Hart’s “Policies, Principles, and Adjudication,” which I uncovered amongst Ronald Dworkin’s papers at Yale. Hart’s previously unpublished paper was composed between 1977 and 1982 and delivered at a seminar at Oxford. It offers an extended critique of Dworkin’s conception of “policies” in his Taking Rights Seriously. This critique is not reproduced elsewhere in Hart’s published work. The paper also provides an expanded version of Hart’s thoughts, in his “Postscript” to The Concept of Law, on judicial reasoning by analogy and the phenomenology of judicial decision-making. Hart’s essay adds significantly to our understanding of the so-called “Hart-Dworkin debate,” around which much of contemporary Anglophone jurisprudence continues to be structured.