All Legal Philosophy and Jurisprudence

Theorists of what law is, as a general question, rather than practitioners or codifiers of any one system. Belongs here: Montesquieu, whose account of separated powers shaped constitutional design well beyond France, Jeremy Bentham and John Austin as founders of legal positivism, H. L. A. Hart as positivism's twentieth century restatement, and Hans Kelsen and his pure theory of law. Does not belong here: a judge or codifier whose main legacy is a body of decided cases or an enacted code rather than a general theory, classified by that legacy instead.