ABSTRACT
The life of the law, more precisely its primary reality, is not in the logic of conceptual coherence or of understanding what other people have thought or said or stipulated or commanded or enacted, nor in the experience of cause and effect and patterns of recurrence. It is primary because the rational force of this claim is fully intelligible even before one knows anything much about the content of the law and certainly before one has been taught anything about law in general or "the concept of law". Further on in The Concept of Law, Hart argued that law should be understood as, centrally, a union of primary with secondary rules. There is a sense in which the idea of having a society regulated by justice and responsible government and the rule of law is an ideal.
