Ronald Dworkin 1931 – 2013

Ronald Myles Dworkin was an American legal and political philosopher and one of the most influential jurisprudential thinkers of the late twentieth century. Successor to H. L. A. Hart in the chair of jurisprudence at Oxford and long-serving professor at New York University, he developed an interpretive theory of law in which principles, alongside rules, are part of the law and judges have a duty to reach the right answer in hard cases. Taking Rights Seriously, Law's Empire, and Justice for Hedgehogs articulated this theory and a broader liberal egalitarian political philosophy. He was also a frequent essayist on constitutional law in the New York Review of Books.

Ronald Myles Dworkin was born in Worcester, Massachusetts, in December 1931. He took his bachelor's at Harvard and a second bachelor's at Magdalen College, Oxford, as a Rhodes Scholar, then his JD at Harvard Law School in 1957. He clerked for Judge Learned Hand on the Second Circuit, practised at Sullivan & Cromwell in New York, and joined the Yale Law School faculty before succeeding H. L. A. Hart in 1969 as Chair of Jurisprudence at University College, Oxford. From 1975 he combined Oxford with a chair at New York University and in later years a part-time appointment at University College London.

His major books are Taking Rights Seriously (1977), A Matter of Principle (1985), Law's Empire (1986), Life's Dominion (1993), Freedom's Law (1996), Sovereign Virtue (2000), Justice in Robes (2006), Is Democracy Possible Here? (2006), Justice for Hedgehogs (2011), and Religion without God (2013). He was a regular essayist for the New York Review of Books for over four decades.

Dworkin developed a constructive interpretive theory of law as integrity in opposition to Hart's positivism, defended a 'right answer' thesis against legal indeterminacy, treated rights as trumps over collective goals, and argued for equality of resources rather than welfare as the egalitarian currency. His mature position fused law, morality, and political philosophy into a single domain of value held together by interpretive judgement. He died in London in February 2013.