A Life of H.L.A. Hart: The Nightmare and the Noble Dream

Melbourne University Law Review, April, 2005 by G. Edward White

There are several reasons why Hart's time in practice did not--unlike his academic years--provide Lacey with an abundance of data. First, one could hardly expect Hart's fellow barristers, even those who were his close friends, to have left many records of his performance. Indeed, few of Hart's contemporaries were still alive when Lacey began her interviews. Further, successful junior barristers, in the 1930s as well as today, work very long hours and have little time for reflecting upon their professional lives. Finally, much of the data Lacey presents on Hart's legal career is clustered among two time periods: 1936-37, when he first met Jenifer and was offered a philosophy fellowship at New College, and 1944-45, when, in the process of winding down his responsibilities with MI5, he again considered leaving the bar to study philosophy at Oxford. They are arguably unrepresentative in that they both involved periods in which Hart was considering leaving the bar, so that he might have more readily expressed his misgivings about legal practice.

In a book of over 350 pages, Lacey devotes only 13 to the nine years that Hart spent practising law. She cites three sources that are purported to characterise Hart as a lawyer. One is Richard Wilberforce, his close friend at Oxford, who came to the bar at the same time as Hart. He described Hart as 'loving the intellectual demands', being 'strongly competitive', 'enjoying new prosperity' (25) and 'making his way into new circles.' (26) Another is Isaiah Berlin, who in 1936 described Hart as 'one of [his] most prosperous friends'. (27) The third is a 'famous barrister' who, on encountering the philosopher Stuart Hampshire, expressed that Hart had been 'by far the most talented man at the Chancery Bar' and that his eventual decision to leave the bar for academic life was 'a tragic loss to the profession', indeed, 'a betrayal.' (28) From these sources Lacey concludes that '[i]t is generally acknowledged that [Hart] was the most gifted' of his Oxford contemporaries at the Bar and that he had an 'outstanding talent for ... legal analysis and advocacy.' (29) Hart may well have been an outstanding barrister, but one second-hand assessment from an unnamed source in the late 1940s hardly provides much authority for Lacey's conclusion. (30)

More importantly, Lacey does not give the reader much basis for speculating about what Hart may have learned in legal practice that aided him as a legal scholar, or why in 1937 he turned down the opportunity to leave the bar for a philosophy fellowship but then accepted the identical fellowship seven years later. She quotes two long letters Hart wrote to friends about Oxford and the bar on both occasions. Although the letters, to Christopher Cox and Isaiah Berlin, were written seven years apart, they evinced similar sentiments. As Hart put it to Cox, '[a]t the bar one just feels quasi-dead with overwork or plain bored'; on the other hand he feared being 'melancholy in the insidious sapping Oxford way' should he take up a fellowship. (31) By 1944 he was still concerned and told Berlin that if he returned to law practice after the war 'the volume of my work would submerge all other intellectual interests, narrow the understanding and corrupt my life', and that 'at the end of a life as a successful or unsuccessful barrister I shall be unable to look back on it without disgust.' (32)