 Ronald Dworkin argued that Hart’s focus on language had a toxic effect on legal philosophy. He wrote that Hart suffered from a ‘semantic sting’, because he wrongly thought ‘that lawyers all follow certain linguistic criteria for judging propositions of law’ (Dworkin 1986b, 45; see section 6.1 below). That argument in the philosophy of language has set an agenda for much debate in philosophy of law (see, for example, the essays in Coleman, 2001).