Reconsideration and new interpretation of the Hart-Fuller debate and their value for analytical legal philosophy

Discussions of the late 1950s on pages of Harvard Law Review between two outstanding philosophers of law representing various and in many respects antagonistic legal directions have made strong impact on the development of Anglo-American legal philosophy and legal theory as a whole. It is the intellectual opposition of an Oxford professor H.L.A. Hart and a Harvard professor L.L. Fuller, which went down in history of legal thought as the 'Hart-Fuller debate'. However domestic researches, unlike western ones, do not pay sufficient attention to this grandiose contact. In educational literature, Hart's and Fuller's theories are considered in isolation and somehow superficially; scientific literature in general lacks complex researches revealing the essence of these discussions and their importance for jurisprudence, except for several articles of fragmentary character, and some Hart's and Fuller's works translated into Russian. This article suggests interpreting the content of these discussions differently. The subject component of the dispute of Hart with Fuller can be understood and comprehended, if to know their basic works. And concentration on the sensual-emotional context of their interpersonal relations allows estimating this exchange of opinions from another, more private, side unrevealed in Harvard Law Review. The philosophical paradigm, owing to which Hart became so influential and known, dominates over legal area. While Fuller's wider interests, which often lie outside jurisprudence, have no less essential value for the legal theory. The point is not in the one who 'has won' or 'has lost'. The basic thesis consists in the fact that Fuller in this dispute was in an inevitable disadvantage. Fuller had to constantly defend his views, answering sets of questions. Hart's substantive provisions and discussion conditions rooted in analytical legal philosophy. Therefore the dispute interpreted and estimated Fuller's argument substantially from the point of view of the criteria inherent in this discipline. But the value of Fuller's heritage for jurisprudence consists in interpreting legal institutes and processes not so much in philosophical as in wider social-legal and interdisciplinary sense. Probably therefore, in the history of legal thought Fuller's role is reduced to the role of Hart's opponent, which, of course, does not allow to estimate his contribution adequately. The essence of these discussions is that, due to Hart's influence on Fuller and the shift of analytical methodology to the jurisprudence area, the division of types of law interpretation into legal and natural-legal loses its urgency A new concept - analytical jurisprudence - uniting all the existing legal currents in a single whole appears in legal philosophies since 1950s.

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