Ronald Dworkin

1931-2013 · American · Legal philosophy, jurisprudence, political philosophy, ethics

Two great values, dignity and equal concern, anchor the rest.

When H. L. A. Hart retired from Oxford's Chair of Jurisprudence in 1969, he chose his own successor: an American already dismantling the tradition Hart had built. Ronald Dworkin brought a lawyer's taste for argument and a moralist's refusal to leave stakes abstract, spending his career at Oxford and NYU engaging every constitutional controversy from the New York Review of Books.

Topics Ronald Dworkin addresses

• law as integrity
• rights as trumps
• the right answer thesis
• the Hart-Dworkin debate
• equality of resources
• the moral reading of the Constitution
• fit and justification
• Hercules (the ideal judge)
• equal concern and respect
• the unity of value
• interpretive realism
• the envy test
• the hypothetical insurance market
• brute luck and option luck
• the desert-island auction
• equality of welfare versus equality of resources
• Cohen's expensive-taste objection
• integrity and community
• the partnership conception of democracy
• interpretation of law
• internal and external skepticism
• dignity as an anchoring value
• substantive due process
• originalism and judicial restraint

Converse with Ronald Dworkin on Symposium. Every reply is grounded in Ronald Dworkin's own writing and cites the page it came from. The corpus is public-domain text.