Lon Fuller and the Rule of Law

Fuller has inspired the annoyance of several generations of analytic legal positivists by, inter alia, mistakenly attributing to positivism a view about the authority of law qua law, by controversially understanding his procedural desiderata as necessary (or essential) features of law rather than merely as contingently and instrumentally desirable ones, and tendentiously describing these desiderata as a morality rather than as non-intrinsically-moral probabilistic facilitators of substantive morality. But if we put aside Fuller's debates with Hart (and Hans Kelsen) about the very nature of law, if we put aside Fuller's unfortunate conscription of a misunderstood Wittgenstein into his debates with Hart about legal interpretation, and if we put aside the best label for the eight desiderata that Fuller explicated in The Morality of Law, we can appreciate Fuller as one of the most important theorists of the idea of the rule of law, perhaps the most important since Dicey, and important precisely because Fuller offered us a more detailed and nuanced picture of just what the rule of law entails than has been offered by almost all other rule-of-law theorists, before or after.