‘Bentham’s and Austin’s theory was exactly right where Hart thought it failed, namely in its search for

the coercive dimension accompanying any law.’ Discuss.

In assessing the above statement we must take a look at the context of the writer H L A Hart Professor
of Jurisprudence at the University of Oxford. Who was both a philosopher as well as a lawyer and was
admitted to the bar in 1932 and practiced law for 09 years before he worked for the british war office
during the second world war and proceeded to lecture philosophy at New College Oxford until he was
appointed Professor of Jurisprudence at the University of Oxford.

His aim was to provide a theory of law which is both general and descriptive which is evident in his book
the concept of law published in 1961, In this book Hart attempts to state his views on many of the
traditional problems in legal philosophy in a comprehensive and systematic way. He wanted to illustrate
where the theories and attempts to define law, by other jurists had failed and his outtake on defining
law by introducing the relationship between rules, morality on coercion.

Hart was what one would refer to as a soft positivist, and did not see eye to eye on the positivistic ideas
of positivists such as Jeremy Bentham and Austin. One of the core criticisms Hart doted on with regard
to the theories of these two jurists are their similarity in their ideas on the imperative theory of law,
which Hart believed should be discarded for reasons that it dictates a cramping framework and distorts
important aspects of the law. Although Bentham was an imperative theorist he however he expressed
himself in a more elusive manner as opposed to Austin. Instead his theory of positivism was more
inclined to his Utilitarian outlook on life. He did not resort to deeper concepts of the imperative theory
as suggested by Austin such as illimitability and the indivisible powers of the sovereign. Instead his
presentation of the imperative theory law was constructed around the idea of Utilitarianism

18 Hart also suggests that Bentham’s legal positivism is logically independent of his utilitarianism,
and that the latter often ‘gets in the way of’ the former