According to him, the sovereign is described as “any person or assemblage of persons to whose will a political community are supposed to pay obedience”. It follows then that the sovereign is the person or assemblage of persons whose command is imperative.
HERBERT HART
His conception of law which restated in modern guise the legal positivist's doctrine on the separation of law and morality in a way which enabled the political philosophy of the time to pursue its own concerns with scant regards for the details of law and legal system. According to Herbert, legal positivism has its origin in human acts and contrivances. This is to say that there is no necessary connection between the existence of a law and its moral justification fits well with the assumption that law can be identified by its distinguishing social features and interpreted by references to its intelligent content alone.
Herbert's concept of law is mostly political which involve the three organ of government: the legislative, the executive and the judiciary. However, he went further to say that in the world of ordinary law, the three organs of governments has their duty as its paradigm of legal process. The application of those rules which can be shown to be legally valid within the system in question, for the fact that they are established through procedures designed to arrive at the truth about the circumstances at issue. He said the task of specifying which rules but an elaboration of the concepts of a rule by distinguishing between what he calls primary rules of conduct, rules which requires or enable individuals to act or refrain from acting in certain ways; and secondary rules are rules that followed in the adoption, alteration and application of the primary rules.
JOHN RALWS
He conceives law of the rule of law as the rules and impartial administration of these public rules. He also treats the legal order as a system of public rules addressed to rational persons. Rule of law for him, is that law that requires actions which people can not reasonably be expected to do or to avoid. Law should be promulgated be clear and non retrospective. There should be no offence without a law.
Rawls also believes that the precepts of natural justice are required by the rule of law in order to make sure that the decisions as to whether the rule has been broken are properly made, and that the correct penalties are imposed.
L. L FULLER
Fuller conceived “law as something deserving loyalty must represent a human achievement. It cannot be a simple fiat of power or a repetitive pattern discernible in the behaviour of state officials” of all the definitions given by philosophers, only few can pass master as law in the strict sense of the word.
He went further to say that between the internal and external moralities that internal of law is richer, and provides a basic for establishing a necessary connection between law and substantive morality. He does not belief that law can be separated from morality. Fuller rejects the notion of law as “a one-way projection of authority” in favor of what he calls “an interractional view of law. He treats this interractional view with substantive moral content that cannot be derived from the basic idea of regulating the conduct of responsible, self-determining agents by means of public, general rules.
JOHN AUSTIN
According to Austin, law is the right, obligation and sanction which were assumed to be common to all developed legal system. He also said that law is law with or without morality and that law does not have any bearing with morality. Austin just like Bentham does not restricts this command which comes directly from the sovereign. It is also the general commands of sub-ordinate political authorities or supervisors in as much as they have the blessing of the sovereign and it is his will that, they be obeyed are also law. It follows that for Bentham and Austin in the concept of law, the sovereign himself is above the law of the land.
CHAPTER THREE: HART'S CONCEPT OF LAW
HART'S CONCEPTION OF LAW AND SOCIETY
H.L.A. Hart's has been described as a sophisticated positivist who has presented a sophisticated version of legal positivist. Law according to Hart is coercive orders. It is “rules forbidding on enjoining certain types of behaviour under penalty”. law is rules requiring people to compensate those whom they injure in certain ways, and also rules specifically what must be done to make wills, contracts, or other arrangements, which confer rights and create obligations”.
Hart did not stop at describing what law is. He criticizes the command-theory of law of Bentham and Augustine on the ground that it does not account for all kinds of law. Law will be absurd if we perceive it and present it as a command. In Hart's opinion, it is simply an expression by one person of the desire that another person should do or abstain from an action, accomplished by a threat of punishment which is likely to follow dis-obedienc3. This view did not go down well with Hart's concept of law.
