Abstract

This paper suggests that the most plausible candidate for the core question of the Hart Dworkin debate is the question of whether there are some elements of juridicity beyond the social-factual law-identifying features of a Hartian rule of recognition, and if there are, what they amount to. I show how this central question both corresponds to Hart’s and Dworkin’s projects of elucidating the essential nature of law and at the same time escapes their respective attempts to accommodate each other’s theoretical accounts. After presenting both authors’ relevant texts wherein they explicitly acknowledge the existence of the core question suggested in this paper, I argue that this question may be shown to constitute a fundamental criterion for the categorization of each legal-philosophical account of the nature of law into two basic groups according to the answer that the account provides to the core question of the debate. I do so without necessarily endorsing either Hart’s or Dworkin’s project