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.