As HLA Hart once remarked, “in order to understand certain features of legal institutions or legal rules, the aims and purposes they are designed to fulfil must be understood.” Certain features of its legal system that the United States shares with many other countries can be understood as fulfilling the aims of unconditional love as a norm and expectation. To quote Gabriele Taylor, “The moral status of love is of course much discussed by philosophers, poets and novelists.” Yet the ways in which love concepts insinuate themselves into the law are seldom examined as closely as they deserve to be. For better and for worse, concepts of unconditional love seep consequentially into policy and practice, mattering to how we understand responsibility and accountability. Among the reasons legal theorists need to take unconditional love quite seriously is that it has implications for coercive law. Modern western no-fault divorce laws imply valuing the ability easily to sever important commitments and start fresh. Yet contemporary laws relating to evidentiary privileges, parental support of disabled adult children, prison visitation, and abortion are among the legal rules explicable to the communities bound by them because the notion that some love (and some duty) is and ought to be unconditional is a pervasive one. Joseph Raz illuminated marital love, parental love and loving friendships as powerful, life-meaning generating attachments. It is no wonder that the law serves to fulfil the aims of unconditional conceptions of familial love, a love that can be a stranglehold, as well as a reliable basis of affectionate companionship, care and concern.

Anita L Allen is the Henry R. Silverman Professor of Law and Professor of Philosophy. A graduate of Harvard Law with a PhD from the University of Michigan in Philosophy, Allen is internationally renowned as an expert on philosophical dimensions of privacy and data protection law, ethics, bioethics, legal philosophy, women’s rights, and diversity in higher education. She was Penn’s Vice Provost for Faculty from 2013-2020 and chaired the Provost’s Arts Advisory Council.

A prolific scholar, Allen has published over 120 articles and chapters, and her books include Unpopular Privacy: What Must We Hide (Oxford, 2011); Privacy Law and Society (Thomson/West, 2017); The New Ethics: A Guided Tour of the 21st Century Moral Landscape (Miramax/Hyperion, 2004); Why Privacy Isn’t Everything: Feminist Reflections on Personal Accountability (Rowman & Littlefield, 2003), and Uneasy Access: Privacy of Women in a Free Society (Rowman & Littlefield, 1988).

She has given lectures all over the world, been interviewed widely, and has appeared on television, radio and in major media.

Further information

The HLA Hart Memorial Lecture is an annual lecture delivered in Oxford by a distinguished speaker. The lecture is named after HLA Hart (1907-1992), who became Professor of Jurisprudence in Oxford in 1952 and was the author of the highly influential book The Concept of Law. The lecture takes place under the auspices of University College, Oxford, where Hart held his chair, and is supported by the Tanner Lectures on Human Values.

The HLA Hart Visiting Fellowship in Law has been endowed in perpetuity, thanks to a transformative gift from the Rt Hon. Lord Mance, (1961, Law). We are grateful to him for this generous contribution to the life of the College, and in recognition of this will rename the Fellowship the HLA Hart-JH Mance Visiting Fellowship in Philosophy, Law and Politics. Read more