On Conceptual Analysis Of Law

Many debates in Anglo-American Jurisprudence focused on the concept of law.All these debates which originated from The Concept of Law(1961) by H.L.A.Hart and had been continuing to now days led to a lot of important works and theses.These subjects and studies were deemed as the most important progress of jurisprudence in almost 50 years.So-called conceptual analysis aims at finding out the nature or necessary attributes of concept and explaining these attributes philosophically.Hart proposed three recurrent issues in The Concept of Law which represented two orientations of general jurisprudence:Has law necessary connection with coercion? Has law necessary connection with morality? General jurisprudence focused on these two problems after the publishing of The Concept of Law,especially the later.It is most important taking a successful theory of concept which can give an explanation of concept or necessity.This is the fundamentals of general jurisprudence.Possible world semantics developed by Saul Kripke and Hilary Putnam is the proper theory. According to their semantics,there is logical difference between concept and description:concepts which lie in the metaphysical level refer to the object in the world directly;but the descriptions which lie the epistemological level are the results of recognition of humanbeing.As Hart's semantics,the empirical semantics wrongly identified the law and the knowledge of law which didn't distinguished metaphysical and epistemological these two different levels.Moreover this unsecssesful conceptual analysis led Hart to take unreasonable expressivist concept of morality and value-detached concept of law.The separation thesis is the conclusion from these concepts of morality and law.Although Joseph Raz and Ronald Dworkin didn't made their theory of concept clear,we can summarize the difference between metaphysical level and epistemological level from their moral and legal theories.According to their accepted theory of concept, morality should be understood as objective and law should be understood as normative.In a word,conceptual analysis is not only the focus of contemporary general jurisprudence,but also the main standard of measure for so many theses from all kinds of legal philosophers in this domain.