ABSTRACT
For three decades now, much of the Anglo-American legal philosophy curriculum has been organized around something called "the Hart/Dworkin debate", a debate whose starting point is Ronald Dworkin's 1967 critique of the seminal work of Anglophone jurisprudence in the twentieth century, H. L. A. Hart's 1961 book The Concept of Law. This chapter examines methodology that has come to the fore in epistemology, philosophy of mind, and ethics. The Hart/Dworkin debate begins with Dworkin's 1967 paper "The Model of Rules", which attributes to Hart's four doctrines, all of which Dworkin rejects. In Law's Empire, Dworkin advanced the idea that law is an "interpretive concept". The Substantive Thesis of the Naturalistic Method is, to be sure, no a priori truth, and nor is it presented as such by naturalists like Quine or his followers. The thesis is also, to be sure, widely denied, and not just by postmodernists and professors of English.
