Lon L. Fuller
| Lon L. Fuller | |
|---|---|
| Born |
June 15, 1902 Hereford, Texas, United States |
| Died | April 8, 1978 (aged 75) Munich, Bavaria, Germany |
| Era | 20th-century philosophy |
| Region | Western Philosophy |
|
Main interests
|
Legal philosophy |
|
Notable ideas
|
“Eight Ways to Fail to Make a Law,” "The Demands of the Inner Morality of the Law," Eight Legal Excellences" |
Lon Luvois Fuller (June 15, 1902 – April 8, 1978) was a noted legal philosopher, who criticized legal positivism and defended a secular and procedural form of natural law theory. Fuller was professor of Law at Harvard University for many years, and is noted in American law for his contributions to both jurisprudence and the law of contracts. His debate in 1958 with the prominent British legal philosopher H. L. A. Hart in the Harvard Law Review (Vol. 71) was important in framing the modern conflict between legal positivism and natural law theory. In his widely discussed 1964 book, The Morality of Law, Fuller argues that all systems of law contain an "internal morality" that imposes on individuals a presumptive obligation of obedience. According to law professor Robert S. Summers, "Fuller was one of the four most important American legal theorists of the last hundred years."
In his 1958 debate with Hart and more fully in The Morality of Law (1964), Fuller sought to steer a middle course between traditional natural law theory and legal positivism. Like most legal academics of his day, Fuller rejected traditional religious forms of natural law theory, which view human law as rooted in a rationally knowable and universally binding "higher law" that derives from God. He also rejected the idea, found in some traditional natural law theorists and famously endorsed by Martin Luther King, Jr. in his Letter from Birmingham Jail, that an unjust law is not a law. On the other hand, Fuller also denied the core claim of legal positivism that there is no necessary connection between law and morality. According to Fuller, certain moral standards, which he calls "principles of legality," are built into the very concept of law, so that nothing counts as genuine law that fails to meet these standards. In virtue of these principles of legality, there is an inner morality to the law that imposes a minimal morality of fairness. Some laws, he admits, may be so wicked or unjust that they should not be obeyed. But even in these cases, he argues, there are positive features of the law that impose a defensible moral duty to obey them.
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