H.L.A. Hart is probably the most important legal theorist in the modern English-speaking world. The intriguing subtitle of Nicola Lacey\u27s intimate biography, The Nightmare and the Noble Dream, echoes the name of Hart\u27s 1997 Georgia Law Review paper, in which he identifies two warring, equally inadequate, visions of law in American jurisprudence: the nightmare of complete indeterminacy and unbridled judicial discretion and the noble dream of a closed, deterministic legal system of judicial restraint. Lacey implies that Hart\u27s life itself was both a nightmare and a noble dream. This book review expands on Lacey\u27s work and suggests how both the most significant failing in Hart\u27s theoretical work-namely his inability to formulate an adequate account of the morality that supposedly serves as law\u27s defining other-as well as his passionate argument against what he perceived as the repressive moralism of conservative legalism, may reflect his internal personal struggles, particularly with respect to his repressed sexuality
