There’s a classic debate in philosophy of law about the status of so-called immoral legal systems. The example typically used is Nazism and question is framed as follows. Do we say, as Lon Fuller famously argued, that “laws” passed by the German legislature in the 1930s cannot accurately be called “laws” by viture of their flagrantly immoral nature? Or do we say, along with H. L. A. Hart, that Nazi law is in fact “law”, insofar as it follows from a recognizably legal process?

In Law’s Empire, Ronald Dworkin argues (I think compellingly) that this debate is largely based on theories of law which overstate the role of semantic rules in legal interpreation. There is a widely-used sense of “law” in which Nazi law clearly qualifies. That is, we often use the term to refer simply to the product of legislative actions. Yet, when we speak of the “rule of law” and “respect for law”, we have in mind a loftier notion of justice that Nazi law lacked. In Dworkin’s words (p. 103-104):

We need not deny that the Nazi system was an example of law… because there is an available sense in which it plainly was law. But we have no difficulty in understanding someone who does say that Nazi law was not really law, or was law in a degenerate sense, or was less than fully law. For he is not then using “law” in that sense… His judgment is now a special kind of political judgment for which his language, if the context makes this clear, is entirely appropriate.