                   The meaning of “an unjust law is not a law” is essentially identical to Hart’s “This is law but too iniquitous to be applied or obeyed” (or availed of as a defense). The excitement and hostility aroused amongst modern legal theorists (notably Hart) by the former way of speaking is unwarranted. No one has difficulty in understanding locutions such as “an invalid argument is no argument,” “a disloyal friend is not a friend,” “a quack medicine is not medicine,” and so forth. “Lex iniusta non est lex” has the same logic; it acknowledges, in its opening words, that what is in question is in certain important respects—perhaps normally and presumptively decisive respects—a law, but then in its withdrawal or denial of that predicate it affirms that, since justice is the very point of having and respecting law at all, this particular law’s deficiency in justice deprives it of the decisive significance which all law purports to have. It is thus law only in a sense that should be judged—especially when law is regarded, as by Hart himself, as a kind of reason or purported reason for  action—to be a distorted and secondary, non-central sense.