Lon Fuller

Writing after World War II, Lon L. Fuller notably emphasised that the law must meet certain formal requirements (such as being impartial and publicly knowable). To the extent that an institutional system of social control falls short of these requirements, Fuller argues, we are less inclined to recognise it as a system of law, or to give it our respect. Thus, law has an internal morality that goes beyond the social rules by which valid laws are made. Fuller and Hart were colleagues at Oxford University. One of the disagreements between Fuller, a natural lawyer, and Hart, a positivist, was whether Nazi law was so bad that it could no longer be considered law.