Hart-Fuller Debate on Law and Morality

The Hart–Fuller debate is the most influential 20th-century exchange on the relation between law and morality, conducted primarily through a pair of articles in the Harvard Law Review in 1958: H.L.A. Hart's "Positivism and the Separation of Law and Morals" (71 Harv. L. Rev. 593) and Lon L. Fuller's reply, "Positivism and Fidelity to Law — A Reply to Professor Hart" (71 Harv. L. Rev. 630). The immediate occasion was a real postwar German case, the so-called "grudge informer" case decided by a West German court in 1949, involving a woman who, in 1944, denounced her husband to Nazi authorities for making disparaging remarks about Hitler while home on leave, resulting in his conviction and near-execution under wartime statutes; after the war, the postwar court held the wife criminally liable, reasoning that the Nazi statute under which the husband had been convicted was so gravely unjust that it had never been valid law at all.