Ronald Dworkin insisted even the hardest legal cases have a right answer
Imagine a law banning sacrilegious contracts, and two men arguing over a deal signed on a Sunday. Most legal theorists would say the judge simply has to choose. Ronald Dworkin disagreed: properly interpreted, the law already holds an answer, and a wise enough judge could find it.
Dworkin was born in Worcester, Massachusetts, on 11 December 1931 and grew up in Providence, Rhode Island. After a summa cum laude philosophy degree from Harvard in 1953 he went to Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, where his final exam script so impressed the examiners that they summoned the Professor of Jurisprudence, H. L. A. Hart, to read it. He then earned a law degree at Harvard in 1957 and clerked for the famed judge Learned Hand, who called him the clerk to beat all clerks.
He turned down a Supreme Court clerkship with Felix Frankfurter, a choice he later called a very serious mistake, and joined a New York firm instead. In 1962 he moved to Yale Law School, and in 1969 he succeeded Hart himself in the Oxford chair, with Hart backing his candidacy. Later he taught at University College London and at New York University, where he ran a colloquium with Thomas Nagel.
The irony is that Dworkin became the sharpest critic of Hart's legal positivism, the view that law can be identified without weighing its moral merits. In Law's Empire he argued that law is interpretive: judges should read statutes and precedents as one coherent scheme of principle, guided by justice and fairness, an idea he called law as integrity. He rejected the notion that judges enjoy discretion in difficult cases. His model was Judge Hercules, an imaginary jurist of vast wisdom, complete knowledge and unlimited time; when real lawyers disagree, he said, they are disputing what Hercules would decide. The two men still stayed on good terms.
He also argued for a moral reading of the US Constitution and wrote about the Supreme Court for decades in The New York Review of Books. In 2007 he received the Holberg Prize, and one survey ranked him the second most-cited American legal scholar of the 20th century. He died on 14 February 2013.
Source: Ronald Dworkin
