Ronald Dworkin, que murió a los 81 años, fue ampliamente respetado como el filósofo del derecho más original y poderoso del mundo de habla inglesa. En sus libros, sus artículos y su enseñanza, en Londres y Nueva York, desarrolló una poderosa exégesis académica de la ley y expuso temas de candente actualidad y preocupación pública, incluida la forma en que la ley debe abordar la raza, el aborto, la eutanasia y igualdad, en formas que fueran accesibles para los lectores legos. Sus argumentos legales fueron aplicaciones sutilmente presentadas a problemas específicos de una filosofía liberal clásica que, a su vez, se basaba en su creencia de que la ley debe tomar su autoridad de lo que la gente común reconocería como virtud moral.
Dworkin estudió filosofía (con Willard Van Orman Quine en la Universidad de Harvard y, informalmente, con JL Austin en la Universidad de Oxford) y derecho tanto en Oxford como en la Facultad de Derecho de Harvard. Trabajó como secretario del gran juez y erudito legal estadounidense Billings Learned Hand y como asociado en ejercicio en el bufete de abogados de Wall Street Sullivan & Cromwell, antes de enseñar derecho en las facultades de derecho de Yale y más tarde en la Universidad de Nueva York, así como en Oxford. y más tarde University College London.
Esta amplia educación y formación, que agudizó las habilidades analíticas de un intelecto bastante excepcionalmente poderoso, le permitió, incluso cuando era un joven precoz, desafiar a las figuras más eminentes del mundo del derecho y la jurisprudencia, incluidos Hand y HLA Hart, el renombrado exponente. del positivismo jurídico, considerando la base social de una ley por separado de sus méritos, en Oxford. Quizás el mayor logro de Dworkin fue su insistencia en una teoría del derecho basada en los derechos, expuesta en su primer y más influyente libro, Taking Rights Serively (1977), en el que proponía una alternativa tanto a la perspectiva de Hart como a las teorías recién acuñadas de la ley. John Rawls, filósofo del derecho de Harvard.
Freedom's Law: The Moral Reading of the American Constitution pdf por Ronald Dworkin
Ronald Dworkin argues that Americans have been systematically misled about what their Constitution is, and how judges decide what it means. The Constitution, he observes, grants individual rights in extremely abstract terms. The First Amendment prohibits the passing of laws that "abridge the freedom of speech"; the Fifth Amendment insists on "due process of law"; and the Fourteenth Amendment demands "equal protection of the laws" for all persons. What does that abstract language mean when it is applied to the political controversies that divide Americans--about affirmative action and racial justice, abortion, euthanasia, capital punishment, censorship, pornography, and homosexuality, for example? Judges, and ultimately the justices of the Supreme Court, must decide for everyone, and that gives them great power. How should they decide? Dworkin defends a particular answer to that question, which he calls the moral reading of the Constitution. He argues that the Bill of Rights must be understood as setting out general moral principles about liberty and equality and dignity, and that private citizens, lawyers, and finally judges must interpret and apply those general principles by posing and trying to answer more concrete moral questions. Is freedom to choose abortion really a basic moral right and would curtailing that right be a deep injustice, for example? Why? In the detailed discussions of individual constitutional issues that form the bulk of the book, Dworkin shows that our judges do decide hard constitutional cases by posing and answering such concrete moral questions. Indeed he shows that that is the only way they can decide those cases. But most judges--and most politicians and most law professors--pretend otherwise. They say that judges must never treat constitutional issues as moral issues because that would be undemocratic--it would mean that judges were substituting their own moral convictions for those of Congressmen and state legislators who had been elected by the people. So they insist that judges can, and should, decide in some more mechanical way which involves no fresh moral judgment on their part. The result, Dworkin shows, has been great constitutional confusion. Is the premise at the core of this confusion really sound? Is the moral reading--the only reading of the American Constitution that makes sense--really undemocratic? In spirited and illuminating discussions both of the great constitutional cases of recent years, and of general constitutional principles, Dworkin argues, to the contrary, that the distinctly American version of government under principle, based on the moral reading of the Constitution, is in fact the best account of what democracy really is.