H. L. A. Hart

Herbert Lionel Adolphus Hart (18 July 1907 – 19 December 1992) was an English legal philosopher.

He was the Professor of Jurisprudence at Oxford University and the Principal of Brasenose College, Oxford.

His most famous work is The Concept of Law, which has been hailed as "the most important work of legal philosophy written in the twentieth century".

He is considered one of the world's foremost legal philosophers in the twentieth century.

Herbert Lionel Adolphus Hart was born on 18 July 1907, the son of Rose Samson Hart and Simeon Hart, in Harrogate, to which his parents had moved from the East End of London.

His father was a Jewish tailor of German and Polish origin; his mother, of Polish origin, daughter of successful retailers in the clothing trade, handled customer relations and the finances of their firm.

Hart had an elder brother, Albert, and a younger sister, Sybil.

Hart was educated at Cheltenham College, Bradford Grammar School and at New College, Oxford.

He took a first in classical greats in 1929.

Jenifer Hart was, for some years in the mid-1930s and fading out totally by decade's end, a 'sleeper' member of the Communist Party of Great Britain.

Three decades later she was interviewed by Peter Wright as having been in a position to have passed information to the Soviets, and to Wright, MI5's official spy hunter, she explained her situation; Wright took no action.

In fact her work as civil servant was in fields such as family policy and so would have been of no interest to the Soviets.

The person who recruited her, Bernard Floud, interviewed by Wright shortly after, maintained that he was unable to remember ever having done so.

Nor was her husband in a position to convey to her information of use, despite vague newspaper suggestions, given the sharp separation of his work from that of foreign affairs and its focus on German spies and British turncoats rather than on matters related to the Soviet ally.

In fact, Hart was anticommunist.

The marriage contained "incompatible personalities", though it lasted right to the end of their lives and gave joy to both at times.

Hart did joke with his daughter at one point, however, that "[t]he trouble with this marriage is that one of us doesn't like sex and the other doesn't like food", and according to LSE law professor Nicola Lacey, Hart was, by his own account, a "suppressed homosexual".

Hart became a barrister and practised successfully at the Chancery Bar from 1932 to 1940.

He was good friends with Richard Wilberforce, Douglas Jay, and Christopher Cox, among others.

He received a Harmsworth Scholarship to the Middle Temple and also wrote literary journalism for the periodical John O'London's Weekly.

During the Second World War, Hart worked with MI5, a division of British military intelligence concerned with unearthing spies who had penetrated Britain, where he renewed Oxford friendships including working with the philosophers Gilbert Ryle and Stuart Hampshire.

He worked closely with Dick White, later head of MI5 and then of MI6.

Hart worked at Bletchley Park and was a colleague of the mathematician and codebreaker Alan Turing.

Hart's war work took him on occasion to MI5 offices at Blenheim Palace, family home of the Dukes of Marlborough and the place where Winston Churchill had been born.

He enjoyed telling the story that there he was able to read the diaries of Sarah Churchill, Duchess of Marlborough, wife of the founder of the dynasty John Churchill, 1st Duke of Marlborough.

Hart's wit and humanity are demonstrated by the fact that he particularly enjoyed the passage where Sarah tells that John had been away for a long time, had arrived suddenly, and "enjoyed me straight way in his boots".

Another incident of life at Blenheim which Hart enjoyed recounting was that he shared an office with one of the famous Cambridge spies, Anthony Blunt, a fellow member of MI5.

Hart wondered which of the papers on his desk Blunt had managed to read and to pass on to his Soviet controllers.

Hart did not return to his legal practice after the war, preferring instead to accept the offer of a teaching fellowship (in philosophy, not law) at New College, Oxford.

Hart cites J. L. Austin as particularly influential during this time.

The two jointly taught from 1948 a seminar on 'Legal and Moral Responsibility'.

Among Hart's publications at this time were the essays 'A Logician's Fairytale', 'Is There Knowledge by Acquaintance?', 'Law and Fact' and 'The Ascription of Responsibility and Rights'.

In 1952, Hart was elected Professor of Jurisprudence at Oxford and was a fellow at University College, Oxford, from 1952 to 1973.

In the interim, he published another major work, Causation in the Law (with Tony Honoré) (1959).

He was president of the Aristotelian Society from 1959 to 1960.

It was in the summer of that year that he began writing his most famous book, The Concept of Law, though it was not published until 1961.

He gave the 1962 Master-Mind Lecture.

Hart married Jenifer Fischer Williams, a civil servant, later a senior civil servant, in the Home Office and, still later, Oxford historian at St Anne's College (specialising in the history of the police).

Jenifer Hart was believed by her contemporaries to have had an affair of long duration with Isaiah Berlin, a close friend of Hart's. Jenifer published her memoirs under the title Ask Me No More in 1998.

The Harts had four children, including, late in life, a son who was disabled, the umbilical cord wrapped around his neck having deprived his brain of oxygen.