Lon Fuller

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Lore & Background

Fuller was born in Hereford, Texas and grew up in the Imperial Valley in Southern California. He went to Stanford University as an undergraduate and for law school. He taught at the University of Oregon School of Law, then at Duke University School of Law, where one of his students was future US president Richard Nixon. In 1940, he joined Harvard Law School, and was elevated to the Carter chair of jurisprudence in 1948. He remained at Harvard until retiring in 1972. He also practiced law with the firm of Ropes, Gray, Best, Coolidge & Rugg at Boston, where he worked in labor arbitration. At Harvard, he taught both contract law and jurisprudence, and pushed to reform the pedagogical approach of the law faculty. Fuller died at age 75 at his home in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He was survived by his wife, Marjorie, two children from a previous marriage – F. Brock Fuller and Cornelia F. Hopfield – and two stepchildren, William D. Chapple and Mimi Hinnawi. He had eight grandchildren. 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. Fuller accepted the idea, found in the writings of some traditional natural law theorists, that in some cases unjust laws or legal systems are not law. In his famous 'Reply to Professor Hart', part of the Hart–Fuller debate, he wrote: 'When a system calling itself law is predicated upon a general disregard by judges of the terms of the laws they purport to enforce, when this system habitually cures its legal irregularities, even the grossest, by retroactive statutes, when it has only to resort to forays of terror in the streets, which no one dares challenge, in order to escape even those scant restraints imposed by the pretence of legality - when all these things have become true of a dictatorship, it is not hard for me, at least, to deny to it the name of law.' (p. 660) 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, the law has an inner morality 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. According to Fuller, all purported legal rules must meet eight minimal conditions in order to count as genuine laws. The rules must be (1) sufficiently general, (2) publicly promulgated, (3) prospective (i.e., applicable only to future behavior, not past), (4) at least minimally clear and intelligible, (5) free of contradictions, (6) relatively constant, so that they don't continuously change from day to day, (7) possible to obey, and (8) administered in a way that does not wildly diverge from their obvious or apparent meaning. These are Fuller's 'principles of legality.' Together, he argues, they guarantee that all law will embody certain moral standards of respect, fairness, and predictability that constitute important aspects of the rule of law. Fuller presents these issues in The Morality of Law with a story about an imaginary king named Rex who attempts to rule but finds he is unable to do so in any meaningful way when any of these conditions are not met. Fuller contends that the purpose of law is to subject 'human conduct to the governance of rules'. If any of the eight principles is flagrantly lacking in a system of governance, the system will not be a legal one. The more closely a system is able to adhere to them, the nearer it will be to the rule-of-law ideal, though in reality all systems must make compromises and will fall short of perfect ideals of clarity, consistency, stability, and so forth. In a review of The Morality of Law, Hart criticises Fuller's work, saying that these principles are merely ones of means-ends efficiency; it is inappropriate, he says, to call them a morality. Employing Fuller's eight principles of legality, one could just as well have an inner morality of poisoning as an inner morality of law, which Hart claims is absurd. In this phase of the argument, the positions of the disputants are transposed. Fuller proposes principles that would easily fit into a positivistic account of law and Hart points out that Fuller's principles could easily accommodate an immoral morality. Other critics have challenged Fuller's claim that there is a prima facie obligation to obey all laws. Some laws, it is claimed, are so unjust and oppressive that there is not even a presumptive moral duty to obey them. In 1954 Fuller proposed the term eunomics to describe 'the science, theory or study of good order and workable arrangements'. Stemming from behavioral systems theory, it was an attempt to fuse what Fuller saw as the inherent morality of law with the empirical data and methods of the objective sciences. Its main practical application appears to be as a form of industrial dispute resolution.

Reader's Guide

Fuller's significance lies in his articulation of a procedural natural law theory that challenged both traditional religious natural law and legal positivism. His 1958 debate with H. L. A. Hart in the Harvard Law Review became a landmark in jurisprudence, framing the modern conflict between positivism and natural law. In The Morality of Law (1964), Fuller argued that all systems of law contain an 'internal morality' that imposes a presumptive obligation of obedience. His eight principles of legality—generality, public promulgation, prospectivity, clarity, freedom from contradictions, constancy, possibility of obedience, and administration not wildly diverging from apparent meaning—were intended to show that law inherently embodies moral standards of fairness and predictability. Critics, including Hart, argued these principles are merely ones of means-ends efficiency, not morality. Others challenged Fuller's claim of a prima facie obligation to obey all laws. Robert S. Summers said in 1984: 'Fuller was one of the four most important American legal theorists of the last hundred years'. Fuller also proposed the term 'eunomics' in 1954 to describe 'the science, theory or study of good order and workable arrangements', stemming from behavioral systems theory. His works include Law in Quest of Itself (1940), Basic Contract Law (1947), Problems of Jurisprudence (1949), The Morality of Law (1964), Legal Fictions (1967), and Anatomy of Law (1968).

Did You Know?

• Fuller taught at Duke University School of Law, where one of his students was future US president Richard Nixon.
• In his famous 'Reply to Professor Hart', Fuller wrote that a dictatorship that departs from the inner morality of law may 'cease to be a legal system'.
• Fuller presented his eight principles of legality through a story about an imaginary king named Rex who fails to rule when any condition is unmet.
• In 1954, Fuller proposed the term 'eunomics' to describe 'the science, theory or study of good order and workable arrangements'.
• Robert S. Summers said in 1984 that Fuller was 'one of the four most important American legal theorists of the last hundred years'.