ABSTRACT
This chapter describes H. L. A. Hart's solution to the chicken-egg problem. Hart offered a solution to the chicken-egg problem that was so promising that it gave theorists reason to abandon the reductive positivistic paradigm. Indeed, Hart's genius was to show how legal authority was dependent on rules without resorting to the natural law and without generating vicious circles or infinite regresses. The idea that norm-governance is dependent on norm-guidance constituted a major breakthrough in analytical jurisprudence. It vindicated the law's claim to legal authority on terms acceptable to the positivist but without reducing legal authority to power relations. Ronald Dworkin characterized the core commitments of legal positivism by the three theses: pedigree thesis, discretion thesis, and obligation thesis. Exclusive rules of recognition are dynamic because the extension of social-source terms like "legislative enactments", "judicial rulings", and "customary norms" are determined by social facts and hence they expand and contract depending on the actions of legal officials or members of the community.
