ABSTRACT
The contemporary period in mainstream legal theory can be dated from the publication in 1961 of Hart’s The Concept of Law. His successful demolition of Austin’s command theory and his own theory of law as a system of rules based on a rule of recognition had two important effects. First, it succeeded immediately in revitalising legal positivism and rescuing it from the inertia into which it had fallen. As a more precise and informative explanation of law, leaving behind the simplicities and explanatory failures of the command theory, it rapidly became the standard model for legal analysis. Second, it created the clearest model to date of the positivist interpretation of law, thus providing the stimulus for new developments in the anti-positivist theories, in particular, that of Dworkin.
