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The Long Arc of Legality: Hobbes, Kelsen, Hart David Dyzenhaus *

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The Long Arc of Legality: Hobbes, Kelsen, Hart David Dyzenhaus *

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 January 2025

Benjamin C. Zipursky
Benjamin C. Zipursky*
Affiliation:
Fordham University, New York, USA
*
Email: [email protected]
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Book Review
Information
Canadian Journal of Law & Jurisprudence , First View , pp. 1 - 9
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2025. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of Faculty of Law, Western University

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Footnotes

*

David Dyzenhaus, The Long Arc of Legality: Hobbes, Kelsen, Hart (Cambridge University Press, 2022), pp. 500 [ISBN 978-1316518052]. All parenthetical page references are to this book.

References

1. See e.g. William Baude & Stephen E Sachs “The Law of Interpretation” (2017) 130:4 Harv L Rev 1079.

2. See e.g. Mark Greenberg, “The Moral Impact Theory of Law” (2014) 123:5 Yale LJ 1288; Scott Hershovitz, “The End of Jurisprudence” (2015) 124:4 Yale LJ 1160.

3. See Adrian Vermeule, Common Good Constitutionalism (Polity Press, 2022).

4. Dyzenhaus characterizes Hobbes as claiming that “the law is a public conscience by which the legal subject has already undertaken to be guided. Legal subjects are to regard themselves as under an obligation of obedience to their sovereign so long as it provides them with a peaceful, stable order.” (120)

5. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed by Richard Tuck (Cambridge University Press, 1996) at 101-02.

6. See e.g. Jeremy Waldron, “Positivism and Legality: Hart’s Equivocal Response to Fuller” (2008) 83:4 NYUL 1135.

7. Here, Dyzenhaus quotes Hans Kelsen, Das Problem der Souveränität und die Theorie des Völkerrechts: Beitraag zu Einer Rainen Rechtslehre (Scientia Verlag, 1981) at 204 [translated by author].

8. Dyzenhaus recognizes that the text he is quoting may be surprising because it seems to reveal Kelsen to be an “anti-positivist.” (267) Rather than treating this passage as an aberration, however, he takes it (and other passages of Kelsen) as “evidence of the natural law features of any legal theory which embarks on explaining law in the register of authority.” (267)

9. Here Dyzenhaus quotes—with a significant excision—Kelsen’s critique of Austinian analytic jurisprudence. See Hans Kelsen, “The Pure Theory of Law and Analytical Jurisprudence” (1941) 55:1 Harv L Rev 44 at 61.

10. See Kelsen, supra note 9.

11. See John Gardner, “Legal Positivism: 5 ½ Myths” (2001) 46:1 Am J Juris 199.

12. Ibid at 201.

13. Ibid at 211.

14. Ibid at 212.

15. See HLA Hart, “Positivism and the Separation of Law and Morals” (1958) 71:4 Harv L Rev 593; Joseph Raz, “Legal Principles and the Limits of the Law” (1972) 81:5 Yale LJ 823.

16. Gardner, supra note 11 at 211.

17. See Ronald Dworkin, “A Reply by Ronald Dworkin” in Marshall Cohen, ed, Ronald Dworkin and Contemporary Jurisprudence (Duckworth, 1984) 247 at 261.

18. Gardner, supra note 11 at 217.

19. See e.g. Ronald Dworkin, Law’s Empire (Harvard University Press, 1986).

20. See Gardner, supra note 11 at 215.

21. Ibid at 217 [emphasis removed].

22. See Benjamin C Zipursky, “Benjamin Cardozo and American Natural Law Theory” (2023) 34 Yale JL & Human 24 (depicting non-Thomistic natural law theory evolving from Cardozo, through Fuller and Dworkin); John CP Goldberg & Benjamin C Zipursky, Recognizing Wrongs (Harvard University Press, 2020).