This article presents H.L.A. Hart’s theory of an ascriptive legal language as it has been developed in his influential paper “The Ascription of Responsibility and Rights” through the application of a methodology of the speech act theory proposed especially by J.L. Austin and partly by J. Searle. I propose to retrieve Hart’s theory of ascriptive statements in the face of critics by carefully analyzing the ascriptions in the context of the speech act theory and cap-turing their linguistic applications in the legal language, at least for some of them. The result is not the refutation of ascriptivism but rather an opportunity for a constructive modifi-cation of Hart’s position
