Law is conceived as a form of the power value – conceived by

Question

The aim of the rules of natural justice is to secure justice or to put it negatively to prevent miscarriage of justice. These rules can operate only in areas not covered by any law validly made. In other words, they do not supplant the law of the land but supplement it. The concept of natural justice has undergone a great deal of change in recent years. In the past, it was thought that it included just two rules namely: (1) no one shall be a judge in his own case (Nemo debet esse judex propria causa) and (2) no decision shall be given against a party without affording him a reasonable hearing (audi alteram partem).
Very soon thereafter a third rule was envisaged and that is that quasi-judicial enquiries must be held in good faith, without bias and not arbitrarily or unreasonably. But in the course of years many more subsidiary rules came to be added to the rules of natural justice. Till very recently it was the opinion of the courts that unless the authority concerned was required by the law under which it functioned to act judicially there was no room for the application of the rules of natural justice. The validity of that limitation is not questioned.
If the purpose of the rules of natural justice is to prevent miscarriage of justice one fails to see why those rules should be made inapplicable to administrative enquiries. Often times it is not easy to draw the line that demarcates administrative enquiries from quasi-judicial enquiries. Enquiries which were considered administrative at one time are now being considered as quasi-judicial in character. Arriving at a just decision is the aim of both quasi-judicial enquiries as well as administrative enquiries. An unjust decision in an administrative enquiry may have more far reaching effect than a decision in a quasi-judicial enquiry as observed by this Court in Suresh Koshy George v. University of Kerala [Civil Appeal No. 990/68, decided on 15-07- 1968], the rules of natural justice are not embodied rules. What particular rule of natural justice should apply to a given case must depend to a great extent on the facts and circumstances of that case, the framework of the law under which the enquiry is held and the constitution of the Tribunal or body of persons appointed for that purpose. Whenever a complaint is made before a court that some principle of natural justice had been contravened the court has to decide whether the observance of that rule was necessary for a just decision on the facts of that case.
[Extract from the judgment of the Supreme Court in A.K. Kraipak v. Union of India, (1969) 2 SCC 262, decided on April 29, 1969, hereafter ‘A.K. Kraipak’].

Answer 1

A quick way to sort these four options is to ask what each thinker or pair of thinkers believed law actually consists of at its core.

Bentham and Austin: For them, law is simply the sovereign's command, enforced through sanction. Power appears here only in the sense of who holds authority to command, not as a value law is designed to distribute or protect.
Hart: Hart's picture of law is a system of rules, some imposing obligations and some conferring powers to make or change those obligations. It is a theory about the internal structure of a legal system, and it does not frame law as an instrument for achieving values such as power.
C Lasswell and McDougal: This pair, associated with the Yale policy-oriented school, saw law as an ongoing process through which a community makes authoritative choices to secure a defined set of values. Power was one of the specific values they identified, and describing law in these terms as a value in itself, particularly the power value, is a phrase drawn straight from their work.
Karl Olivecrona: Olivecrona's realism explains legal rules as ideas that operate on the human mind, prompting behaviour the way a command does, but through psychological association rather than because of any moral or value-based content. Values like power do not feature in his explanation of why law works.

Since only Lasswell and McDougal explicitly built a theory around law as a means of securing values such as power, they are the pair the question is looking for.

Answer 2

Another way to answer this is by grouping the four options into their broader jurisprudential schools first, then checking which school actually talks about "values" as a category at all.

Bentham and Austin: Both belong to classical legal positivism, sometimes called the imperative or command school. Their vocabulary is built around commands, sovereigns, and sanctions, not around a list of social values that law is supposed to protect.
Hart: Hart is also a positivist, though a more refined one than Austin, replacing the single command with a layered system of primary and secondary rules. Like Austin, his account stays within the structure of rules and does not use the language of law as a value.
C Lasswell and McDougal: These two stand apart because they belong to the policy-science tradition, which explicitly analyses law in terms of the values a community seeks through authoritative decisions, values such as wealth, respect, skill, and power. Framing law as a form of the power value is a direct expression of this approach, and it is specifically tied to their names in jurisprudence.
Karl Olivecrona: Olivecrona's realism is concerned with how legal language works on the human mind as a kind of command-substitute, which is a psychological account rather than a value-based one.

Of the four, only the pairing in option (C) belongs to a school built around social values in the first place, so that is the one that correctly completes the statement.

Therefore, the correct answer is C Lasswell and McDougal.

Answer 3

Another way to answer this is by grouping the four options into their broader jurisprudential schools first, then checking which school actually talks about "values" as a category at all.

Bentham and Austin: Both belong to classical legal positivism, sometimes called the imperative or command school. Their vocabulary is built around commands, sovereigns, and sanctions, not around a list of social values that law is supposed to protect.
Hart: Hart is also a positivist, though a more refined one than Austin, replacing the single command with a layered system of primary and secondary rules. Like Austin, his account stays within the structure of rules and does not use the language of law as a value.
C Lasswell and McDougal: These two stand apart because they belong to the policy-science tradition, which explicitly analyses law in terms of the values a community seeks through authoritative decisions, values such as wealth, respect, skill, and power. Framing law as a form of the power value is a direct expression of this approach, and it is specifically tied to their names in jurisprudence.
Karl Olivecrona: Olivecrona's realism is concerned with how legal language works on the human mind as a kind of command-substitute, which is a psychological account rather than a value-based one.

Of the four, only the pairing in option (C) belongs to a school built around social values in the first place, so that is the one that correctly completes the statement.

Therefore, the correct answer is C Lasswell and McDougal.

Law is conceived as a form of the power value – conceived by

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The Correct Option is C

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