Nicola Lacey’s A Life of H. L. A. Hart has the most coherent and thoughtfully articulated purpose of all the biographies in my stack. Lacey aims, she says in her introduction, to write an “intellectual history” of Hart, who is often considered the 20th Century’s most important legal philosopher, using “only the personal material which sheds light on his ideas and the course of his career.” But for a man like Hart, the personal and the intellectual are ineluctably intertwined, and Lacey shows that Hart’s personal life and family history to some extent account for the dominant themes in his philosophy. Hart was drawn to consider the individual’s responsibility both in and apart from society in his work by a deep rooted sense of himself as an outsider – despite the fact that he was, to all appearances, the consummate insider. The contrasts between external success and internal anxieties, Lacey says, “constituted the dynamic tensions which shaped almost all Hart’s work and relationships.” Her attempt to account for the origin and repercussions of these tensions provides the compelling question which drives the narrative. The extent to which she balances Hart’s public and private life without over-weighting either is one of the many admirable things about this book. Some others are the quality of the prose, the fine detail in which even minor characters are depicted, the way in which even quite abstruse areas of jurisprudence are succinctly rendered accessible to the lay person. Her depiction of the complexity and intimacy of Hart’s fifty year marriage is helped by the eloquent articulacy of Hart’s journals, and his correspondence with his wife Jenifer. This biography is intelligent, sensitive, scrupulously researched; I am recommending it for these reasons, and also because of the way in which all of its elements work together to create a unified narrative whole, while still allowing it to end as the author hoped it would in her introduction, “on a note which does justice to [Hart’s] achievements without obscuring his complexities.”

Lacey's Hart biography is stunning. It is radically different from every other biography in that it mainly draws from Hart's vast correspondence, and presents a somewhat different Hart: not only Hart the genius, but one who is at the same time tormented by demons of identity problems, a very complicated emotional bond to his wife, Jenifer Walker, and his doubts about his academic abilities. A very good read indeed, not only to law students. ( )