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Hart, Raz and Kelsen on the Puzzle of Law’s Autonomy

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Human Dignity and the Autonomy of Law

Part of the book series: Law and Visual Jurisprudence ((LVJ,volume 7))

Abstract

The paper attempts to reconstruct the claim for the autonomy of modern western law in the oeuvre of Hart, Raz and Kelsen. It suggests that law’s autonomy for Raz and Hart is realisable in relative terms, as they would accept that law’s ultimate determination depends on social facts; moreover, they argued for no sharp separation between law and morality. This scenario renders the law’s autonomy claim superfluous. Conversely, Kelsen articulated a cogent argument for law’s autonomy by closing the system to the chance of incorporating exogenous elements in legal determination. He based his argument on a non-factual and non-reductive postulate besides strictly separating law from morality. Law’s determination is self-standing; therefore, it is genuinely autonomous. There is no relativisation of the claim. However, this autonomous law becomes problematic because it may irritate rational personal autonomy. Conclusion shows that the law’s claim to autonomy is an intricate puzzle that requires rethinking its possibilities. The challenge is not trivial for legal theory; a sound reflection on the claim would conciliate a genuine autonomous law with rational autonomy.

I want to thank Daniel Dodds for his valuable comments on an earlier draft and the many conversations we have had on the subject. Naturally, he is exempt from the deficiencies that have remained on the paper. Funding from the National Agency for Research and Development of the Republic of Chile (ANID)/DOCTORADO BECAS CHILE/2020-722104830 made this study possible.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Following Hart’s ideas, Marmor also qualifies the autonomy of law. For him, the law is a social practice constituted by “social conventions”. A detailed exposition of his arguments is available at Marmor (2001b) 144 ff.

  2. 2.

    The instrumentalist approach is mainly based on interpreting a passage from the Preface of Marx’s Zur Kritik der Politischen Ökonomie (1859). Marx and Engels offered a similar argument earlier in Die Deutsche Ideologie (1845-1846).

  3. 3.

    Mortimer Sellers edited a collective volume called Autonomy in the law (2007). It addresses how the law regulates private autonomy in various comparative legal systems. It includes multiple practical topics, like assisted dying, wrongful life and the death penalty, from different law disciplines. See esp. the introduction (Sellers 2007, 1–11).

  4. 4.

    This is, of course, the sense exposed by John Austin’s The Province of Law Determined (1832).

  5. 5.

    See, e.g., assertions and descriptions made by Green and Adams (2019), esp. “Development and Influences.”

  6. 6.

    Peter Fitzpatrick’s critique of The Concept of Law and legal positivism in general identified H.L.A. Hart as one of those authors who defended a substantial autonomy of law. “The current champion [of those who assert law’s autonomy] remains H.L.A. Hart with his ‘concept of law’” (Fitzpatrick 1992, 3–6 [brackets added]). Fitzpatrick emphasised the strong connection of law with the social dimension. However, Fitzpatrick errs in believing that the law is entirely autonomous for Hart.

  7. 7.

    Another strong connection point might be between rules and justice in The Concept of Law, chapter VIII. I will not dwell on this point, as I am interested in describing the limited scope of the separability thesis.

  8. 8.

    Marx’s approach to human nature [Gattungswesen] is explained by Geras (2016) 61 ff.

  9. 9.

    In the pages cited above, H.L.A. Hart recognises himself as a “soft positivist”.

  10. 10.

    If one reads Raz’s early work on legal theory and then his later works, one notices changes in his argumentation. Whether he has maintained an unchanging view regarding his idea that legal reasoning encompasses these two types is debatable.

  11. 11.

    A recent discussion on the transit from the factual to the normative in contemporary positivism can be found in Gizbert-Studnicki (2021) 420 ff. Although without extensively reviewing Joseph Raz’s approach. Suggestions on non-naturalism in Anglophone legal philosophy are found in M.S. Green (2021), 277.

  12. 12.

    I take psychologism in a broad sense as an orientation to interpret world events and phenomena in subjective terms, focusing on individual mental factors.

  13. 13.

    An elaborate treatment in recent philosophy of law is found in Gizbert-Studnicki (2021) 429–440; Gizbert-Studnicki (2016) 121–144; Pavlakos (2017), pp. 139–160; Chivoli and Pavlakos (2019) 53–76.

  14. 14.

    In this section, I will not assess the various long-documented shortcomings of Kelsen’s theory of law.

  15. 15.

    I quoted only one of Kelsen’s major works. The sharp separation between law and morality is a recurrent argument in several of Kelsen’s writings throughout his oeuvre and is not limited to the texts I have mentioned here.

  16. 16.

    I will come back to this in more detail later.

  17. 17.

    The original: “Ist die Weise der Verknüpfung der Tatbestände in dem einen Falle die Kausalität, ist es in dem anderen die Zurechnung, die von der Reinen Rechtslehre als die besondere Gesetzlichkeit des Rechtes erkannt wird.” ([1934] 2008, 34). Supra I will comment on this.

  18. 18.

    cf. Paulson (1998), 163. He categorised this type of hypothetical judgment as object-distinction.

  19. 19.

    The original: “Wenn im Vorhergehenden von einer “Geltung” der Norm gesprochen wird, so soll damit zunächst nichts anderes ausgedrückt werden als die spezifische Existenz der Norm, die besondere Art, in der sie gegeben ist; zum Unterschied von dem Sein der natürlichen Wirklichkeit, das in Raum und Zeit verläuft.” ([1934] 2008, 20).

  20. 20.

    Klaus Günther (2019/2021) has discussed the vicissitudes of some constitutional democracies. He suggests an intermediate solution that takes advantage of what he calls a “productive tension” between (substantive) law and (formal) democracy. This paradox also evokes the old controversy between Ius and Lex or, as Franz Neumann’s (1937) formulation, the tension between the two moments of the rule of law: ratio and voluntas.

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  1. Institut für Kriminalwissenschaften und Rechtsphilosophie, Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main, Frankfurt, Germany

    Eduardo A. Chia

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    José Manuel Aroso Linhares

  2. Faculty of Law, University of Alicante, Alicante, Spain

    Manuel Atienza

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Chia, E.A. (2022). Hart, Raz and Kelsen on the Puzzle of Law’s Autonomy. In: Aroso Linhares, J.M., Atienza, M. (eds) Human Dignity and the Autonomy of Law. Law and Visual Jurisprudence, vol 7. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-14824-8_5

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