H. L. A. Hart (1907–1992) was lecturer in philosophy, Professor of Jurisprudence (1952–1969), and Principal of Brasenose College, Oxford. His writings range widely over legal theory, and touch on many important areas in political philosophy as well. He is widely credited with reestablishing analytic jurisprudence as an important area of study with his book The Concept of Law (second edition 1994). Hart’s importance for Rawls falls into three main areas. First, through his influence on the young Rawls, who spent the 1952-1953 academic year at Oxford on a Fulbright, shortly after having inished his dissertation at Princeton University. Rawls attended Hart’s lectures on the philosophy of law, and was greatly influenced by them. (See Freeman 2007b, 3.) (As the influence of this time is diffuse rather than speciic, I shall not speciically further discuss it.) Secondly, Rawls attributes many important ideas in A Theory of Justice to Hart. Finally, and most substantively, Hart’s criticism of Rawls’s First Principle of Justice, as presented in A Theory of Justice, led Rawls to signiicantly revise and clarify it in his later works. In turn, Rawls’s inluence on Hart is apparent in Hart’s work at many places, perhaps most clearly in Hart’s work on punishment, where his program of distinguishing the justiicatory aim of punishment from the proper distributive principle has clear parallels with, and draws on, Rawls’s discussion of punishment in his early paper, “Two Concepts of Rules.” (See Hart 1968, esp. 8–13.) The remainder of this entry details Hart’s clearest and most important points of inluence on Rawls.