Bentham presented his theory as a definition. In focusing their attention on the meaning of the main terms of legal discourse, Bentham and John Austin were ahead of their time. But it has come to be a commonplace (though still controversial) view in legal theory that they were misguided in attempting to define those terms. So, for example, Hart in the sixties rejected definition as useful in philosophy of law (Hart 1994, 14–17). Dworkin in the eighties accused Hart of only repackaging the same approach as the ‘more candidly definitional’ method of John Austin (Dworkin 1986, 32–33). And Posner in the nineties accused both Hart and Dworkin of pointlessly “trying to define ‘law’” (Posner 1996, vii).
There is no reason to describe the work of Hart or Dworkin as defining the word ‘law’. And defining that word would not solve any of the problems of jurisprudence (as Hart pointed out). The fundamental reason is that a definition is useful only to someone who needs to learn the meaning of a word, and legal philosophers know the meaning of the word ‘law’. Their problems and their disputes would not be resolved by a statement that would help someone who did not know what the word meant. Philosophers of law cannot solve their problems by giving a definition of the word ‘law’, any more than philosophers of language can solve their problems by giving a definition of the word ‘language’ (for discussion of the implications for legal philosophy of the semantics and metasemantics of the word ‘law’, see Coleman and Simchen 2003).
A further reason is that, as John Finnis and Ronald Dworkin have both explained in different ways, the word ‘law’ can be used in a variety of senses: the law of the jungle, the law of gravity, laws of thought, Murphy's law, etc. (Finnis 1980, 6; Dworkin 1986, 104). A definition would have to allow for those senses. It might be an intriguing (and arduous) study in culture and human thought to explain the analogies among those senses, but it is a study that holds out no special promise for understanding the law of a community.
