Ronald Dworkin

310 Pages·2012·1.612 MB·English

by  Stephen Guest

ronald dworkin
Jurists: Profiles in Legal Theory
William Twining, General Editor
Ronald Dworkin
third edition
Stephen Guest
stanford law books
An Imprint of Stanford University Press
Stanford, California
Stanford University Press
Stanford, California
©2013 by the Board of Trustees of the
Leland Stanford Junior University.
All rights reserved.
The first and second editions of this book were published in 1992 and 1997
by Edinburgh University Press.
Stephen Guest, 1992, 1997
No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any
means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in any
information storage or retrieval system without the prior written permission of
Stanford University Press.
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, archival-quality paper
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Guest, Stephen, author.
Ronald Dworkin / Stephen Guest. -- 3rd ed.
pages cm
“The first and second editions of this book were published in 1992 and 1997 by
Edinburgh University Press.”
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-8047-7232-7 (cloth : alk. paper) -- ISBN 978-0-8047-7233-4 (pbk. :
alk. paper)
1. Dworkin, Ronald. 2. Law--Philosophy. 3. Jurisprudence. I. Title.
K230.D92G83 2012
340’.1--dc23
2012016359
Typeset by Classic Typography in 10/13 Galliard
Contents
Preface vii
Introduction 1
chapter one
A Sketch of Ronald Dworkin 11
chapter two
Law as Plain Fact 27
chapter three
The Complexity of Legal Argument 45
chapter four
The Interpretation of Law 65
chapter five
The Evaluative Coherence of Legal Argument 83
chapter six
Integrity and Community 101
chapter seven
Objectivity in Law and Morality 124
chapter eight
Treating People as Equals 144
vi Contents
chapter nine
Justice for Hedgehogs 159
chapter ten
Equality of What? 182
chapter eleven
The Basis of Liberalism 208
chapter twelve
Religion and the Beginning and End of Life 225
Notes 245
Bibliography of Ronald Dworkin’s Works 271
Index 287
Preface
Although I confidently stated in the Introduction to the second edition of
this book in 1997 that there wouldn’t be a third edition, here in fact it is.
Certainly the subject-matter justifies it. Dworkin has been prolific in the
past 16 years, producing four important works, Sovereign Virtue (2000),
Justice in Robes (2006), Is Democracy Possible Here? (2006) and, most nota-
bly, his significant work Justice for Hedgehogs (2011), besides a large number
of articles and lectures. It was the publication of Justice for Hedgehogs that
persuaded me. That work is intended by him to stand with Law’s Empire
(1986), Sovereign Virtue, Freedom’s Law (1996) and Justice in Robes to form
one large opus containing his theory of ethics, his theory of morality, his
theory of politics and his theory of law, in addition to establishing his inter-
pretive method (which is his theory of reasoning on matters of value). And
so this third edition is intended bring up to date an account of his work of
almost half a century (his first published piece was in 1963). In particular, I
hope readers will appreciate the significance in Justice for Hedgehogs of his
clear endorsement of the Humean principle separating the empirical world
from that of value. In a way, all else, especially concerning law, follows.
I’m also motivated in returning to Dworkin by my continuing strong
sense that he remains insufficiently challenged. It seems to me that serious
writers only “pick” at his various views but don’t confront them with the
attention they deserve. For example, in spite of so much sense in Hershow-
itz’s recent collection of essays on Dworkin (the best collection, I think),
many of the writers still don’t fully grasp what I think must have been obvi-
ous before even the publication of Law’s Empire in 1986 but certainly after
it, that Dworkin is not engaged in descriptive phenomenology (or, as he
viii Preface
calls it “taxonomic jurisprudence”). Dworkin’s idea that law is a subset of
morality, coupled with his account of the unity of value, is powerful and
compelling. It is “liberating” as he rather grandly says in Justice for Hedge-
hogs. In this third edition, I have made more efforts to consider some of the
contemporary criticisms. Mostly I find that the criticisms are not actually
criticisms at all but misunderstandings or lazy thinking about what Dwor-
kin has actually written. At any rate, where I’ve thought a criticism carried
some reputational weight but misunderstood what Dworkin has said, I’ve
made it my business to bring this to the attention of the reader. My overall
aim is to make reading Dworkin more accessible to a wider audience, per-
haps those who will get the immediate good sense of the theory and thus
approach it in the right frame of mind.
ronald dworkin