This is in essence a book about another book. As Brian Simpson readily concedes, H L A Hart's The Concept of Law ‘is the most successful work of analytical jurisprudence ever to appear in the common law world’ (1). It has accordingly been much expounded and criticised. To the abundant expository and critical literature, Simpson aims to make his own twofold contribution, first, by describing the context in which The Concept of Law was produced and, secondly, by identifying defects in the work hitherto neglected by others.
Simpson's depiction of the context from which The Concept of Law emerged is delightful. True, this context had already been admirably discussed by Nicola Lacey in her wonderful A Life of H L A Hart: The Nightmare and the Noble Dream (2004). But Simpson's account benefits from the fact that he was there from the start. He was an undergraduate at Oxford when Hart was appointed to the chair of jurisprudence in 1952. He attended Hart's inaugural lecture in 1953. His jurisprudence paper was examined by Hart in 1954. And, on the strength of that, Hart not only supported Simpson's appointment to a tutorial fellowship in 1955 but also invited him to join the ‘Hart group’, a weekly discussion group which Hart had established soon after taking up the chair, and of which Simpson would continue to be a member until he left Oxford in 1972 (4–5).
What makes Simpson's account of the context from which The Concept of Law was born especially entertaining is its irreverence for the Oxford law faculty and Oxford philosophers of the 1950s, as well as for analytical jurisprudence and philosophy in general. There are many anecdotes about eccentric Oxford academics. For example, Simpson tells us that Donald MacKinnon, who taught philosophy to and was greatly admired by Iris Murdoch, “sometimes conducted tutorials from his bath, or rolled up in a carpet, or with his dentures sticking out, which pupils tried to catch if they fell out completely” (121–122), while the philosophers Elizabeth Anscombe and Peter Geach “used their staircase in a house in St John's Street, Oxford as a filing system and … ate their way round a table, only washing up when spaces lacking dirty dishes ran out” (97). There are also numerous acerbic observations about icons such as J L Austin (“a strange person, with a reputation for exaggerated cleverness, pedantry, bullying, and negativity”, 42) and Ludwig Wittgenstein (“[o]ne view is simply that he was a charlatan … I incline to agree”...
