Ronald Dworkin, who has died aged 81, was widely respected as the most original and powerful philosopher of law in the English-speaking world. In his books, his articles and his teaching, in London and New York, he developed a powerful, scholarly exegesis of the law, and expounded issues of burning topicality and public concern – including how the law should deal with race, abortion, euthanasia and equality – in ways that were accessible to lay readers. His legal arguments were subtly presented applications to specific problems of a classic liberal philosophy which, in turn, was grounded in his belief that law must take its authority from what ordinary people would recognise as moral virtue.
Dworkin studied philosophy (under Willard Van Orman Quine at Harvard University and, informally, with JL Austin at Oxford University) and law at both Oxford and the Harvard Law School. He worked as clerk to the great US judge and legal scholar Billings Learned Hand and as a practising associate in the Wall Street law firm Sullivan & Cromwell, before teaching law at the Yale and later the New York University law schools, as well as at Oxford and later University College London.
This broad education and training, sharpening the analytical skills of a quite exceptionally powerful intellect, enabled him, even as a precocious young man, to challenge the most eminent figures in the world of law and jurisprudence, including Hand and HLA Hart, the renowned exponent of legal positivism – considering the social basis of a law separately from its merits – at Oxford. Perhaps Dworkin's greatest achievement was his insistence on a rights-based theory of law, expounded in his first and most influential book, Taking Rights Seriously (1977), in which he proposed an alternative both to Hart's outlook and to the newly minted theories of the Harvard philosopher of law John Rawls.
Is Democracy Possible Here : Principles for a New Political Debate pdf by Ronald Dworkin
Politics in America are polarized and trivialized, perhaps as never before. In Congress, the media, and academic debate, opponents from right and left, the Red and the Blue, struggle against one another as if politics were contact sports played to the shouts of cheerleaders. The result, Ronald Dworkin writes, is a deeply depressing political culture, as ill equipped for the perennial challenge of achieving social justice as for the emerging threats of terrorism. Can the hope for change be realized? Dworkin, one the world's leading legal and political philosophers, identifies and defends core principles of personal and political morality that all citizens can share. He shows that recognizing such shared principles can make substantial political argument possible and help replace contempt with mutual respect. Only then can the full promise of democracy be realized in America and elsewhere. Dworkin lays out two core principles that citizens should share: first, that each human life is intrinsically and equally valuable and, second, that each person has an inalienable personal responsibility for identifying and realizing value in his or her own life. He then shows what fidelity to these principles would mean for human rights, the place of religion in public life, economic justice, and the character and value of democracy. Dworkin argues that liberal conclusions flow most naturally from these principles. Properly understood, they collide with the ambitions of religious conservatives, contemporary American tax and social policy, and much of the War on Terror. But his more basic aim is to convince Americans of all political stripes--as well as citizens of other nations with similar cultures--that they can and must defend their own convictions through their own interpretations of these shared values.