 That, in brief, is the apogee of the use of philosophy of language in philosophy of law. Bentham was ahead of his time. His theory of the meaning and use of words anticipated various trends in twentieth-century philosophy of language (including Frege’s and Wittgenstein’s ‘context principle’, some views of logical positivists, and the development of speech act theory). It was H.L.A.Hart who, in the 1950s and 1960s, made a concerted effort to use twentieth-century developments in philosophy of language to ‘elucidate’ the nature of law. He did so with an enthusiasm for the work of Wittgenstein, and also of the Oxford philosophers J.L.Austin and Paul Grice. So Hart had some advantages over Bentham. Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations had been directed against the view that a word’s meaning is the thing for which it stands as a name. That was one of the misconceptions that distorted Bentham’s theory of the meaning of words: he thought that a word like ‘right’ had to be a name for an entity, and that since no such entity could be sensed, the word was a name for a ‘fictitious entity’ (Bentham 1782, 251). And J.L.Austin took an attitude to ordinary discourse that was quite opposed to that of Bentham, who thought that philosophy must tear away the ‘veil of mystery’ that ordinary language throws over every object of study (Bentham 1782, 251). Wittgenstein’s attitude was more complex: he thought both that philosophers create philosophical problems by bewitching themselves with language, and also that a clear understanding of the use of language could provide healthy therapy for people suffering from philosophical problems. Taking advantage of the insights of Wittgenstein and J.L.Austin, Hart aimed to put philosophy of language to work in addressing problems of legal philosophy, without making what he regarded as Bentham’s extravagant mistakes.