Question

Passage A
Legal positivism, articulated influentially by H.L.A. Hart, maintains that the existence and authority of law depend entirely on social facts and institutional pedigree rather than intrinsic moral merit. Central to this jurisprudential framework is the 'rule of recognition'—a shared, conventional standard practiced by legal officials that establishes the criteria for identifying valid legal norms within a community. Under this view, legal validity is strictly circumscribed by pedigree: a rule qualifies as binding law because it has emanated from an authoritative source recognized by the legal community, not because it satisfies any external moral standard. When authoritative rules run out or exhibit semantic indeterminacy—what Hart termed the 'open texture' of legal language—judges are not discovering preexisting, latent legal requirements. Rather, they are exercising a bounded, interstitial legislative discretion, generating new legal rules to resolve novel disputes where the existing positive law is silent. Consequently, judicial discretion is not a defect in legal science, but an inevitable boundary condition of any rule-governed system.

Passage B
Ronald Dworkin’s theory of 'law as integrity' mounts a foundational critique of positivist accounts of judicial decision-making. Dworkin contends that judges confronted with hard cases do not step outside the boundaries of the law to wield legislative discretion; instead, they remain bound by an expansive web of legal principles and moral standards embedded within the legal order itself. In Dworkin’s view, legal practice is an interpretive, constructive enterprise akin to writing a chain novel: each judicial decision must both 'fit' the historical record of institutional decisions and justify that record in light of the best available political morality. Thus, legal rights and obligations do not terminate at the limits of explicit statutory or precedential text. Because legal principles operate alongside explicit rules—providing gravitational force and coherent justification—there is almost always a single legally correct answer to complex disputes. To view judges as mini-legislators acting in interstitial voids fundamentally misapprehends the nature of legal argument, reducing principled rights-based adjudication to retroactive policymaking.

Based on the passages, match each jurisprudential concept on the left with the theoretical function or characterization attributed to it on the right.