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H.L.A. Hart's secondary rules: what do ‘officials’ really think?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 April 2017

David Howarth  and
Shona Wilson Stark
David Howarth
Affiliation:
Professor of Law and Public Policy, University of Cambridge, Fellow of Clare College, Cambridge. Clare College, Trinity Lane, Cambridge, CB2 1TL, UK. E-mail: [email protected].
Shona Wilson Stark*
Affiliation:
College Lecturer and Fellow in Law, Christ's College, Cambridge. Christ's College, St Andrew's Street, Cambridge, CB2 3BU, UK. E-mail: [email protected].
*
Corresponding author. [email protected]
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Abstract

The impact of H.L.A. Hart's The Concept of Law on modern legal thinking is undisputed. But does it reflect the reality of the way British institutions work? In Concept, Hart argued, amongst other things, that one of two ‘minimum conditions necessary and sufficient for the existence of a legal system’ was that ‘its rules of recognition specifying the criteria of legal validity and its rules of change and adjudication must be effectively accepted as common public standards of official behaviour by its officials’. In this paper, we begin the process of testing that statement empirically. Specifically, we ask whether non-judicial UK officials have a uniform view of what the rules of recognition, change and adjudication are, and whether they uniformly take an internal point of view towards them (i.e. whether they accept the rules and do not merely obey them). By way of a pilot study, thirty non-judicial UK officials were interviewed. Those officials comprised currently serving and retired senior civil servants, senior military officials, chief constables and local authority chief executives. The findings of the pilot study are presented in this paper. They allow us to deduce that Hart's statement might well be an inaccurate and incomplete description of the modern British constitution, and to comment on the implications of that conclusion.

Type
Articles
Information
International Journal of Law in Context , Volume 14 , Issue 1 , March 2018 , pp. 61 - 86
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2017 

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Footnotes

The authors acknowledge the generous support of the LeRoux Trust. We also thank many people, especially Dan Priel, the participants in seminars in London and in Bergen (supported respectively by the Constitution Society and the Faculty of Law of the University of Bergen) and the anonymous reviewers, for their very helpful comments on previous drafts.

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