Lon Luvois Fuller (June 15, 1902 – April 8, 1978) was an American legal philosopher best known as a proponent of a secular and procedural form of natural law theory.
[3] He also practiced law with the firm of Ropes, Gray, Best, Coolidge & Rugg at Boston, where he worked in labor arbitration.
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.
(p. 655)Professor Hart castigates the German courts and Radbruch, not so much for what they believed had to be done, but because they failed to see that they were confronted by a moral dilemma of a sort that would have been immediately apparent to Bentham and Austin.
By the simple dodge of saying, "When a statute is sufficiently evil it ceases to be law," they ran away from the problem they should have faced.
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.
Fuller presents these issues in The Morality of Law with an entertaining 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.
[11] In 1954 Fuller proposed the term eunomics[12] to describe "the science, theory or study of good order and workable arrangements".
[13] 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.