ABSTRACT
Everything up to this final chapter could be read as an elaboration of the extravagant things I am now going to say about the supreme text of jurisprudence, Hart’s The Concept of Law (1961). As a prelude to locating the exotically impure in a work that is a byword in the trade for purity, I will adapt a previous analysis which identifies a profound dislocation or contradiction in the work (Fitzpatrick 1991). I will then show how myth, in mediating this contradiction, is essential to this most influential assertion of law’s autonomy. In the process, I will amplify those mythic evocations of law’s autonomy encountered in the first chapter.
