| This thesis offers a reading of the legal philosophy of the mid-twentieth century legal scholar, Lon L. Fuller. By illuminating how Fuller's vision of law gravitates constantly to the relationship between the form of law and the status of the legal subject as an agent, this reading provides a basis for revisiting the issues in dispute in his famous exchanges with the legal positivist philosopher, H.L.A. Hart.;The thesis is comprised of five chapters. In Chapter 1, I introduce the context of Fuller's legal philosophy by surveying the concerns of his jurisprudential writings prior to the commencement of his exchanges with Hart. In Chapters 2, 3 and 4, I offer a close textual analysis of Fuller's position in the three major writings that are most readily associated with those exchanges: his reply to Hart in the 1958 Harvard Law Review , his 1964 book The Morality of Law, and the "Reply to Critics" that brought the Hart-Fuller debate to a close in 1969. In Chapter 5, I conclude the thesis by assessing the implications of my reading for prevailing debates in legal philosophy about the relationship between law and legality, and for our understanding of the questions at issue in the Hart-Fuller debate more generally.;The thesis as a whole seeks to meet two main objectives. First, I seek to demonstrate how Fuller's persistent concern for the way that the form of law instantiates respect for the legal subject lends his legal philosophy a coherence that has been insufficiently appreciated to this point. Second, I seek to elaborate the claim that once we appreciate the centrality of the relationship between legal form and agency to Fuller's thought, we come to understand why he insisted that law can and should be distinguished from other modes of ordering, and why it must also be regarded as distinctively moral. |
