Law Is the Command of the Sovereign: H. L. A. Hart Reconsidered |
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| Authors: | Andrew Stumpff Morrison |
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| Affiliation: | University of Michigan Law School, Ann Arbor, Michigan, USAI wish to thank Amy Kuras, Simon Blackburn, Brian Tamanaha, Martin Osborne, Robert Axelrod, Robert J. Aumann, James Fearon, Mark Schwimmer, Theodore St. Antoine, Howard Bromberg, Richard D. Friedman, and Sonja Starr, as well as anonymous reviewers on behalf of Ratio Juris, for comments on an earlier draft (with all or part of which some of the foregoing vehemently disagreed), and Seth Quidachay‐Swan and Danny Lawder of the University of Michigan Law Library, for research assistance. I am also grateful to Frederick Schauer for permitting me to review an advance draft of his book The Force of Law (Schauer ). |
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| Abstract: | This article presents a critical reevaluation of the thesis—closely associated with H. L. A. Hart, and central to the views of most recent legal philosophers—that the idea of state coercion is not logically essential to the definition of law. The author argues that even laws governing contracts must ultimately be understood as “commands of the sovereign, backed by force.” This follows in part from recognition that the “sovereign,” defined rigorously, at the highest level of abstraction, is that person or entity identified by reference to game theory and the philosophical idea of “convention” as the source of signals with which the subject population has become effectively locked, as a group, into conformity. |
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