Beyond Survival

In March 1984, a distinguished group of legal scholars held a conference to honour H. L. A. Hart at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Hart himself participated in the event, having diligently prepared for it in the preceding months. ¹ Hart's former doctoral student, and arguably his foremost heir as a theoretician of legal positivism, the Israeli legal philosopher Joseph Raz was present, as was Ronald Dworkin, Hart's successor at Oxford, and several other of Hart's students. His nationality notwithstanding, Raz had made an exception to his long-standing position of refusing to enter Israel, which he had upheld since the Six-Day War of 1967 and the unlawful occupation of the West Bank, Gaza, and other Palestinian territories. Raz's reluctance was deep, and he himself compared participating in a publicly funded conference in Israel to doing the same in apartheid South Africa. ² In order to be able to participate and honour Hart, Raz's compromise was to organize a one-day, extracurricular seminar on human rights at the Palestinian Bir Zeit University, to which he invited the other participants of the main conference. Despite the repressive circumstances and hardships the scholars at Bir Zeit laboured under, the event was a success. Among those who joined this counter-workshop was the Australian legal philosopher John Finnis, who had studied under Hart at Oxford. Four years prior to the conference in Jerusalem, Finnis had published his magnum opus Natural Law and Natural Rights in Hart's own book series Clarendon Law at Oxford University Press. ³ This massive treatise in which the Catholic Finnis defended a secular theory of modern natural law, had in fact been commissioned by Hart himself, even specifying the title. Hart did not only teach Finnis and commission his book, he continuously supported Finnis (as he did many other scholars) with detailed comments on manuscripts and incisive comments in correspondence and meetings. ⁴ During the Jerusalem trip, Hart, as per usual, made sure to do some sight-seeing. Asking Finnis to join him, they walked up the Mount of Olives and sat at a bench overlooking the Temple Mount and the old city. Hart, who was always convivial but rarely personal, “alluded to the fact that they were seeing Jerusalem through different eyes.” ⁵ At the time, Finnis thought that it was their identities as Catholic and Jew which gave them different perspectives; it was only after Hart's death that he realized how Hart had hidden his deep antipathy to religion. Even though Hart was secular, he never hid his Jewish heritage and at one point he even surprised Dworkin by pointing out that it was remarkable that no English person had held the Oxford Chair of Jurisprudence for decades. “Amazed, Dworkin replied, ‘But you are English.’ ‘No,’ Herbert retorted, ‘I’m Jewish.’” ⁶ But both Hart and his wife Jenifer were staunch atheists and raised their children accordingly. This makes the respect and even more encouragement that Hart showed to Finnis, as well as many other colleagues of different ideologies and faiths, even more impressive. In a particularly telling story, the two “firm—one might even say devout—atheists” accepted their son Jacob's conversion to Catholicism and even fought with the Jesuit clergy so that he could be baptized with the Dominicans at Blackfriars to whom he had become particularly attached. ⁷