罗纳德·德沃金 (Ronald Dworkin) 享年 81 岁，被广泛尊为英语世界中最具原创性和影响力的法学哲学家。在他的著作、文章和他在伦敦和纽约的教学中，他对法律进行了强有力的、学术性的诠释，并阐述了热门话题和公众关注的问题——包括法律应如何处理种族、堕胎、安乐死和平等——以非专业读者可以理解的方式。他的法律论点被巧妙地应用于经典自由主义哲学的具体问题，而这反过来又基于他的信念，即法律必须从普通人公认的道德美德中获得权威。
德沃金在牛津大学和哈佛法学院学习哲学（在哈佛大学的威拉德·范·奥尔曼·奎因（Willard Van Orman Quine）的指导下，非正式地在牛津大学的 JL Austin 学习）和法律。在耶鲁大学和后来的纽约大学法学院以及牛津大学教授法律之前，他曾担任伟大的美国法官和法律学者 Billings Learned Hand 的文员，以及华尔街律师事务所 Sullivan & Cromwell 的执业助理以及后来的伦敦大学学院。
这种广泛的教育和训练，磨练了一个异常强大的智力的分析技能，使他即使是一个早熟的年轻人，也能挑战法律和法理学界最杰出的人物，包括汉德和赫拉·哈特，著名的代表人物法律实证主义——将法律的社会基础与其优点分开考虑——在牛津。德沃金最大的成就也许是他坚持以权利为基础的法律理论，这在他的第一本也是最有影响力的著作《认真对待权利》（1977 年）中进行了阐述，在书中他提出了一种替代哈特的观点和新兴的法律理论哈佛法学家约翰·罗尔斯。
Freedom's Law: The Moral Reading of the American Constitution pdf 罗纳德·德沃金
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.