Ronald Dworkin Quotes on Justice
Ronald Dworkin’s Taking Rights Seriously (1977), Law’s Empire (1986), and the late Justice for Hedgehogs (2011) gave the late twentieth-century philosophy of law its principal liberal alternative to the legal positivism descending from Hart and Kelsen. The central thesis is that legal practice cannot be understood without the moral principles that figure in the constructive interpretation through which judges decide hard cases — law as integrity is the Herculean ideal of the judicial decision that fits the precedents while displaying them in the morally best light. The corresponding political philosophy develops a sophisticated egalitarian liberalism (equality of resources rather than equality of welfare, the right to be treated with equal concern and respect) and a unified theory of value that integrates ethics, morality, and political philosophy.
Quotes
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Attributed to Ronald Dworkin:
“Law is an interpretive concept.”
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Attributed to Ronald Dworkin:
“Rights are trumps over collective goals.”
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Attributed to Ronald Dworkin:
“Hard cases have a right answer, even if reasonable judges disagree.”
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Attributed to Ronald Dworkin:
“Equality of resources, not of welfare, is the proper egalitarian ideal.”
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“Nixon is no longer president, and his crimes were so grave that no one is likely now to worry very much any more about the details of his own legal philosophy. Nevertheless in what follows I shall use the name 'Nixon' to refer, not to Nixon, but to any politician holding the set of attitudes about the Supreme Court that he made explicit in his political campaigns. There was, fortunately, only one ”
Taking Rights Seriously (1978), p. 164 -
“Law's Empire (1986), Preface”
We live in and by the law . It makes us what we are: citizens and employees and doctors and spouses and people who own things. It is sword , shield, and menace: we insist on our wage, or refuse to pay our rent, or are forced to forfeit penalties, or are closed up in jail, all in the name of what our abstract and ethereal sovereign, the law, has decreed. And we argue about what it has decreed, even