10 - The Morality of the Rule of Law: Lon L. Fuller

Summary

For readers of legal philosophy, the title of this entry is likely to generate an expectation of a discussion that runs something like this. In the mid-twentieth century, the idea of the rule of law began to figure prominently and problematically within the long-standing debate between legal positivists and natural lawyers about the connections between law and morality. The question that presented itself for answering was the following. Could the positivist “separability thesis” – the argument that there is no necessary connection between law and morality – be said to hold with respect to the connection (if any) between the concept of “law” and the concept of “the rule of law”?