Ronald Myles Dworkin (; December 11, 1931 – February 14, 2013) was an American legal philosopher, jurist, and scholar of United States constitutional law. At the time of his death, he was Frank Henry Sommer Professor of Law and Philosophy at New York University and Professor of Jurisprudence at University College London. Dworkin had taught previously at Yale Law School and the University of Oxford, where he was the Professor of Jurisprudence, successor to philosopher H. L. A. Hart.
An influential contributor to both philosophy of law and political philosophy, Dworkin received the 2007 Holberg International Memorial Prize in the Humanities for "his pioneering scholarly work" of "worldwide impact". According to a survey in The Journal of Legal Studies, Dworkin was the second most-cited American legal scholar of the twentieth century. After his death, Harvard legal scholar Cass Sunstein said Dworkin was "one of the most important legal philosophers of the last 100 years. He may well head the list."
His theory of law as integrity as presented in his book Law's Empire, in which judges interpret the law in terms of consistent moral principles, especially justice and fairness, is among the most influential contemporary theories about the nature of law. Dworkin advocated a "moral reading" of the United States Constitution and an interpretivist approach to law and morality. He was a frequent commentator on contemporary political and legal issues, particularly those concerning the Supreme Court of the United States, often in The New York Review of Books.
Ronald Dworkin was born in 1931 in Worcester, Massachusetts, the son of Madeline Taber and David Dworkin. He was schooled and grew up in Providence, Rhode Island. His family is Jewish. He graduated from Harvard University in 1953 with an A.B., summa cum laude, where he majored in philosophy and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa in his junior year. He then attended Magdalen College, Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, where he was a student of Sir Rupert Cross and J. H. C. Morris. Upon completion of his final exams at Oxford, the examiners were so impressed with his script that the Professor of Jurisprudence (then H. L. A. Hart) was summoned to read it. He was awarded a B.A. with a congratulatory first. Dworkin then attended Harvard Law School, graduating in 1957 with a Juris Doctor, magna cum laude.
After law school, Dworkin was a law clerk to Judge Learned Hand of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit from 1957 to 1958. Hand would later call Dworkin "the law clerk to beat all law clerks", and Dworkin would recall Judge Hand as an enormously influential mentor.
While clerking for Hand, Dworkin was offered a clerkship with Justice Felix Frankfurter of the U.S. Supreme Court. Dworkin declined the offer, a decision he later called "a very serious mistake." He instead joined Sullivan & Cromwell, a New York City law firm, as an associate.
In 1962, Dworkin left Sullivan & Cromwell and became a professor of law at Yale Law School, becoming the holder of the Wesley N. Hohfeld Chair of Jurisprudence. In 1969, he was appointed to the Chair of Jurisprudence at Oxford, a position in which he succeeded H. L. A. Hart (who remembered Dworkin's Oxford examination and promoted his candidacy) and was elected Fellow of University College, Oxford. After retiring from Oxford, Dworkin became the Quain Professor of Jurisprudence at University College London, where he later became the Bentham Professor of Jurisprudence. He was Frank Henry Sommer Professor of Law at New York University School of Law and professor of philosophy at New York University (NYU), where he taught from the late 1970s. He co-taught a colloquium in legal, political, and social philosophy with Thomas Nagel. Dworkin had regularly contributed, for several decades, to The New York Review of Books. He delivered the Oliver Wendell Holmes Lecture at Harvard, the Storrs Lectures at Yale, the Tanner Lectures on Human Values at Stanford, and the Scribner Lectures at Princeton. In June 2011, he joined the professoriate of New College of the Humanities, a private college in London.
Dworkin's criticism of H. L. A. Hart's legal positivism has been summarized by the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:
Dworkin, as positivism's most significant critic, rejects the positivist theory on every conceivable level. Dworkin denies that there can be any general theory of the existence and content of law; he denies that local theories of particular legal systems can identify law without recourse to its moral merits, and he rejects the whole institutional focus of positivism. A theory of law is for Dworkin a theory of how cases ought to be decided and it begins, not with an account of the political organization of a legal system, but with an abstract ideal regulating the conditions under which governments may use coercive force over their subjects.
Dworkin's opinion of Hart's legal positivism was expressed in its fullest form in the book Law's Empire. Dworkin's theory is "interpretive": the law is whatever follows from a constructive interpretation of the institutional history of the legal system. Law should be viewed not as a series of isolated statutes and cases, but as a "single coherent scheme of principle".
Dworkin argues that moral principles that people hold dear are often wrong, even to the extent that certain crimes are acceptable if one's principles are skewed enough. To discover and apply these principles, courts interpret the legal data (legislation, cases, etc.) with a view to articulating an interpretation that best explains and justifies past legal practice. All interpretation must follow, Dworkin argues, from the notion of "law as integrity" to make sense.
Out of the idea that law is "interpretive" in this way, Dworkin argues that in every situation where people's legal rights are controversial, the best interpretation involves the right answer thesis, the thesis that there exists a right answer as a matter of law that the judge must discover. Dworkin opposes the notion that judges have discretion in such difficult cases.
Dworkin's model of legal principles is also connected with Hart's notion of the Rule of Recognition. Dworkin rejects Hart's conception of a master rule in every legal system that identifies valid laws, on the basis that this would entail that the process of identifying law must be uncontroversial, whereas (Dworkin argues) people have legal rights even in cases where the correct legal outcome is open to reasonable dispute.
Dworkin moves away from positivism's separation of law and morality, since constructive interpretation implicates moral judgments in every decision about what the law is.
Despite their intellectual disagreements, Hart and Dworkin "remained on good terms."
In Dworkin's own words, his "right answer thesis" may be interpreted through the following hypothetical:
Suppose the legislature has passed a statute stipulating that "sacrilegious contracts shall henceforth be invalid." The community is divided as to whether a contract signed on Sunday is, for that reason alone, sacrilegious. It is known that very few of the legislators had that question in mind when they voted, and that they are now equally divided on the question of whether it should be so interpreted. Tom and Tim have signed a contract on Sunday, and Tom now sues Tim to enforce the terms of the contract, whose validity Tim contests. Shall we say that the judge must look for the right answer to the question of whether Tom's contract is valid, even though the community is deeply divided about what the right answer is? Or is it more realistic to say that there simply is no right answer to the question?
One of Dworkin's most interesting and controversial theses states that the law as properly interpreted will give an answer. This is not to say that everyone will have the same answer (a consensus of what is "right"), or if it did, the answer would not be justified exactly in the same way for every person; rather it means that there will be a necessary answer for each individual if he applies himself correctly to the legal question. For the correct method is that encapsulated by the metaphor of Judge Hercules, an ideal judge, immensely wise and with full knowledge of legal sources. Hercules (the name comes from a classical mythological hero) would also have plenty of time to decide. Acting on the premise that the law is a seamless web, Hercules is required to construct the theory that best fits and justifies the law as a whole (law as integrity) in order to decide any particular case. Hercules is the perfect judge, but that doesn't mean he always reaches the right answer.