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Ronald Dworkin (born 1931) is an American legal philosopher, and currently professor of Jurisprudence at University College London and the New York University School of Law. He is known for his contributions to legal philosophy and political philosophy. His theory of law as integrity is one of the leading contemporary views of the nature of law. 1931 (MCMXXXI) was a common year starting on Thursday (link is to a full 1931 calendar). ...
Philosophy of law is a branch of philosophy and jurisprudence which studies basic questions about law and legal systems, such as what is law?, what are the criteria for legal validity?, what is the relationship between law and morality?, and many other similar questions. ...
Jurisprudence is the theory and philosophy of law. ...
University College London, commonly known as UCL, is one of the colleges that make up the University of London. ...
Vanderbilt Hall The New York University School of Law (NYU Law) is the law school of New York University. ...
Philosophy of law is a branch of philosophy and jurisprudence which studies basic questions about law and legal systems, such as what is the law?, what are the criteria for legal validity?, what is the relationship between law and morality?, and many other similar questions. ...
Political philosophy is the study of fundamental questions about the state, government, politics, liberty, property, rights, law and the enforcement of a legal code by authority: what they are, why they are needed, what makes a government legitimate, what rights and freedoms it should protect and why, what form it...
Weighing scales represent the way law balances peoples interests For other senses of this word, see Law (disambiguation). ...
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Biographical sketch Ronald Dworkin was born in 1931 in Worcester, Massachusetts, USA. He studied at Harvard University and at Magdalen College, Oxford, where he was a student of Sir Rupert Cross and a Rhodes Scholar. Dworkin then attended Harvard Law School and subsequently clerked for the renowned Judge Learned Hand of the United States Court of Appeals. Judge Hand would later call Dworkin the finest clerk he ever employed, and Dworkin would recall Judge Hand as an enormously influential mentor. After working at Sullivan and Cromwell, a prominent law firm in New York City, Dworkin became a Professor of Law at Yale University, where he became the holder of the Wesley N. Hohfeld Chair of Jurisprudence. Nickname: The Heart of the Commonwealth, The City of the Seven Hills, Wormtown, Woo-town, Wortown (war-town), The City of Diners, Paris of the Eighties Settled: 1673 – Incorporated: 1684 Zip Code(s): 01608 – Area Code(s): 508 / 774 Official website: http://www. ...
Harvard University (incorporated as The President and Fellows of Harvard College) is a private university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. ...
Magdalen College could be Magdalen College, Oxford Magdalene College, Cambridge This is a disambiguation page — a navigational aid which lists other pages that might otherwise share the same title. ...
The University of Oxford, located in the city of Oxford in England, is the oldest university in the English-speaking world. ...
Sir Rupert Cross was a prominent British legal expert. ...
Rhodes House in Oxford Rhodes Scholarships were created by Cecil John Rhodes. ...
Harvard Law School (HLS) is one of the professional graduate schools of Harvard University. ...
Billings Learned Hand (January 27, 1872 – August 14, 1961) — usually called just Learned Hand — was a famed American judge and an avid supporter of free speech. ...
The United States Courts of Appeals (or circuit courts) are the mid-level appellate courts of the United States federal court system. ...
Sullivan & Cromwell is a renowned and highly-regarded U.S. law firm known for representing large corporations such as ExxonMobil and Microsoft. ...
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Yale redirects here. ...
Wesley Newcomb Hohfeld (1879-1918) was the author of the seminal Fundamental Legal Conceptions, As Applied in Judicial Reasoning and Other Legal Essays. ...
In 1969, Dworkin was appointed to the Chair of Jurisprudence at Oxford, a position in which he succeeded H.L.A. Hart, and elected Fellow of University College, Oxford. After retiring from Oxford, Dworkin became the Quain Professor of Jurisprudence at University College London, where he subsequently became the Bentham Professor of Jurisprudence -- a position he still holds.[1] He is also currently Frank Henry Sommer Professor of Law at New York University School of Law and professor of Philosophy at New York University (NYU) [2], where he has taught since the late 1970s. H. L. A. Hart (Herbert Lionel Adolphus Hart) (1907-1992) is considered one of the most important legal philosophers of the twentieth century. ...
University College (in full, the College of the Great Hall of the University, commonly known as University College in the University of Oxford, usually known by its derivative, Univ), is a contender for the claim to be the oldest of the constituent colleges of the University of Oxford in the...
Jurisprudence is the theory and philosophy of law. ...
University College London, commonly known as UCL, is one of the colleges that make up the University of London. ...
Vanderbilt Hall The New York University School of Law (NYU Law) is the law school of New York University. ...
New York University (NYU) is a major research university in New York City. ...
Law as rule and principle - "Positivism's most significant critic rejects the theory on every conceivable level. He 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 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 political organization, but with an abstract ideal regulating the conditions under which governments may use coercive force over their subjects." [3]
Dworkin is most famous for his critique of Hart's positivism; he sets forth the fullest statement of his critique in his 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. H. L. A. Hart (Herbert Lionel Adolphus Hart) (1907-1992) is considered one of the most important legal philosophers of the twentieth century. ...
Legal positivism is a school of thought in jurisprudence and the philosophy of law. ...
Interpretivism is a school of thought in contemporary jurisprudence and the philosophy of law. ...
Dworkin argues that moral principles that people hold dear are often wrong, even to the extent that certain crimes are acceptable if your principles are skewed enough. In order to discover and apply these principles, courts interpret the legal data (legislation, cases etc) with a view to articulating an interpretation which best explains and justifies past legal practice. All interpretation must follow, Dworkin argues, from the notion of "law as integrity" in order 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. Dworkin opposes the notion that judges have such a discretion in 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.
While Dworkin moves away from positivism's separation of law and morality, his concept suggests that the two are related in an epistemic rather than ontological sense as posited by traditional natural law. Legal positivism is a school of thought in jurisprudence and the philosophy of law. ...
Natural law (Latin jus naturale) is law that exists independently of the positive law of a given political order, society or nation-state. ...
The right answer thesis - "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?" (Dworkin, 1978)
One of Dworkin's most interesting and controversial theses states that there is only one right answer for most legal cases. Dworkin uses 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, Dworkin argues, would always come to the one right answer. In language, a metaphor (from the Greek: metapherin rhetorical trope) is defined as a direct comparison between two or more seemingly unrelated subjects. ...
A judge or justice is an official who presides over a court. ...
It has been suggested that this article or section be merged with Heracles. ...
It has been suggested that this article or section be merged with Heracles. ...
Dworkin does not deny that competent lawyers often disagree on what is the solution to a given case. On the contrary, he claims that they are disagreeing about the right answer to the case, the answer Hercules would give.
Dworkin's critics argue that not only law proper (that is, the legal sources) is full of gaps and inconsistencies, but also that other legal standards (including principles) may be insufficient to solve a hard case. Some of them are incommensurable. In any of these situations, even Hercules would be in a dilemma and none of the possible answers would be the right one. // Commensurability in general Generally, two quantities are commensurable if both can be measured in the same units. ...
Look up Dilemma in Wiktionary, the free dictionary For the Nelly song, see Dilemma (song). ...
Dworkin defends his position saying that everyday judges, much like everyday people, find their way and choose between options and values that were supposed to be incommensurable. Dworkin also argues that it is always possible to find out other rules or principles in order to solve the conflict between those we had in mind. The same counter-argument, however, regarding principles and moral standards that are incommensurable, would seem to apply to any further principles or rules we may discover in the process. In other words, the claim that there may always be more principles or rules to be taken into account proves nothing about the nature of those further principles, or about Dworkin's claim that the exercise, in the hands of the omnipotent Judge Hercules, will eventually come to a stop (when we have reached the right answer). In fact, the opposite conclusion could just as well be drawn from Dworkin's claim - that the exercise in question, under the guidance of such an omnipotent figure, would extend into infinity. Thus while a 'right' answer may be available at any given stage, no 'final' right answer would ever be arrived at by Hercules. Or, there is nothing to suggest one way or the other. Each individual has certain underlying values that contribute to their value system (see value in semiotics). ...
Dworkin's metaphor of judge Hercules bears some resemblance to Rawls' veil of ignorance and Habermas' ideal speech situation, in that they all suggest idealized methods of arriving at somehow valid normative propositions. The key difference with respect to the former is that Rawls' veil of ignorance translates almost seamlessly from the purely ideal to the practical. In relation to politics in a democratic society, for example, it is a way of saying that those in power should treat the political opposition consistently with how they would like to be treated when in opposition, because their present position offers no guarantee as to what their position will be in the political landscape of the future (i.e. they will inevitably form the opposition at some point). Dworkin's Judge Hercules, on the other hand, is a purely idealized construct which, as proof of the 'right answer' thesis, can only be taken by something akin to a leap of faith (i.e. if such a figure existed, he would arrive at a right answer in every moral dilemma). John Rawls (February 21, 1921 – November 24, 2002) was an American philosopher, a professor of political philosophy at Harvard University and author of A Theory of Justice (1971), Political Liberalism, Justice as Fairness: A Restatement, and The Law of Peoples. ...
The original position is a hypothetical situation created by American philosopher John Rawls as a thought experiment to replace the imagery of a savage state of nature of prior political philosophers like Thomas Hobbes. ...
Jürgen Habermas Jürgen Habermas (born June 18, 1929 in Düsseldorf) is a German philosopher, political scientist and sociologist in the tradition of critical theory, best known for his concept of the public sphere. ...
Dworkin's right answer thesis turns on the success of his attack on the sceptical argument that right answers in legal-moral dilemmas cannot be determined. Dworkin's anti-sceptical argument is essentially that the properties of the sceptic's claim are analogous to those of substantive moral claims, that is, in asserting that the truth or falsity of 'legal-moral' dilemmas cannot be determined, the sceptic makes not an ontological claim about the way things are, but a moral claim to the effect that it is, in the face of epistemic uncertainty, unjust to determine legal-moral issues to the detriment of any given individual.
Theory of equality Dworkin has also made important contributions to what is sometimes called the equality of what debate. In a famous pair of articles and his book Sovereign Virtue he advocates a theory he calls 'equality of resources'. This theory combines two key ideas. Broadly speaking, the first is that human beings are responsible for the life choices they make. The second is that natural endowments of intelligence and talent are morally arbitrary and ought not to affect the distribution of resources in society. Like the rest of Dworkin's work, his theory of equality is underpinned by the core principle that every person is entitled to equal concern and respect in the design of the structure of society. Dworkin's theory of equality is one variety of so-called luck egalitarianism. See also virtue jurisprudence. Egalitarianism can refer to moral as well as factual theories. ...
Almanac · Categories · Glossaries · Lists · Overviews · Portals · Questions · Site news · Index Art | Culture | Geography | Health | History | Mathematics | People | Philosophy | Science | Society | Technology Wikipedia is an encyclopedia written by its users in over 200 languages worldwide. ...
Moral luck is the phenomenon whereby a moral agent is assigned moral blame or moral praise for an action or its consequences even when it is clear that the agent in question did not have full control over either the action or its consequences. ...
Natural resources are naturally occuring substances that are considered valuable in their relatively unmodified (natural) form. ...
Social equality is a social state of affairs in which certain different people have the same status in a certain respect, minimally at least in voting rights, freedom of speech and assembly, and property rights. ...
Luck egalitarianism is a view about distributive justice espoused by a variety of egalitarian liberal and left-wing political philosophers. ...
In the philosophy of law, virtue jurisprudence is the name given to theories of law related to virtue ethics. ...
In the essay "Do Values Conflict? A Hedgehog's Approach" (Arizona Law Review, Vol 43:2), Dworkin contends that the values of liberty and equality do not necessarily conflict. He criticizes Isaiah Berlin's conception of liberty as "flat" and proposes a new, "dynamic" conception of liberty, suggesting that one cannot say that one's liberty is infringed when one is prevented from committing murder. Thus, liberty cannot be said to have been infringed when no wrong has been done. Put in this way, liberty is only liberty to do whatever we wish so long as we do not infringe upon the rights of others. Berlin, however, might reply by pointing out that Dworkin has merely constructed one (among others) "positive" conception of liberty. It is this type of exercise - defining liberty according to some other value, some conception of "right" and "wrong", to the exclusion of any notion of value-free, "negative" liberty - that has led precisely to the kinds of totalitarian nightmares seen in the 20th century that Berlin warns against. (Liberty, Oxford University Press, 2002. ISBN 0-19-924989-X, expanded version of "Four Essays on Liberty"). Dworkin's own specific conception may be noble and innocent, but the broader notion of liberty as a "dynamic" value is almost identical to what Berlin describes as "positive" liberty (liberty defined according to other social goals in which it is claimed to be inherent), and exploitable as such. Sir Isaiah Berlin, OM, (June 6, 1909 – November 5, 1997) was a political philosopher and historian of ideas, regarded as one of the leading liberal thinkers of the 20th century. ...
One further criticism that can be levelled from the Berlinian enterprise is that the so-called "flat" conception of liberty does not entail the liberty to murder - rather, murder (when it does occur) is only a consequence of natural liberty. When one is prevented from murdering, one's liberty is not infringed merely because one is prevented from murdering, but because (more fundamentally) one is prevented from acting at all, by being restrained, handcuffed, put into prison, etc. The fact that one is thereby prevented from murdering is, again, merely a consequence of one's liberty being infringed. Thus Dworkin's argument can be recast as a deep-level consequentialist one.
Participant in Public Debate Dworkin is also noted for his avid participation in public debates over law and issues of fundamental rights. He has been a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books. The New York Review of Books (or NYREV or NYRB) is a biweekly magazine on literature, culture, and current affairs published in New York which takes, as its point of departure that the discussion of important books is itself an indispensable literary activity. ...
Bibliography
Works by Ronald Dworkin - Taking Rights Seriously (1977)
- A Matter of Principle (1985) This book includes the article Is there really no right answer in hard cases? and "Liberalism" (1978).
- Law's Empire (1986)
- Philosophical Issues in Senile Dementia (1987)
- A Bill of Rights for Britain (1990)
- Life's Dominion (1993)
- Freedom's Law (1996)
- Sovereign Virtue: The Theory and Practice of Equality (2000)
- Justice in Robes (2006)
- Is Democracy Possible Here? Principles for a New Political Debate (2006)
Works about Ronald Dworkin Most contemporary books on jurisprudence give attention to some or all of Dworkin's views and arguments. The following books are devoted to assessing Dworkin's views and arguments. - Marshall Cohen (ed.), Ronald Dworkin and Contemporary Jurisprudence. London: Duckworth, 1984.
- Stephen Guest, Ronald Dworkin. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991.
- Alan Hunt (ed.), Reading Dworkin Critically. New York and Oxford: Berg, 1992.
- Justine Burley (ed.), Dworkin and His Critics. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2004.
- Scott Hershovitz (ed.), Exploring Law's Empire: The Jurisprudence of Ronald Dworkin. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006.
See also This is an (partial) overview of individuals that contributed to the development of liberal theory on a worldwide scale and therefore are strongly associated with the liberal tradition and instrumental in the exposition of political liberalism as a philosophy. ...
Egalitarianism can refer to moral as well as factual theories. ...
H. L. A. Hart (Herbert Lionel Adolphus Hart) (1907-1992) is considered one of the most important legal philosophers of the twentieth century. ...
Interpretivism is a school of thought in contemporary jurisprudence and the philosophy of law. ...
Judicial activism describes an act of judicial interpretation that critics consider to take on suspected political reasoning, rather than an evaluation of applicable law. ...
Legal formalism is a Positivist view in jurisprudence and the philosophy of law. ...
Legal positivism is a school of thought in jurisprudence and the philosophy of law. ...
Liberalism is an ideology, philosophical view, and political tradition which holds that liberty is the primary political value. ...
Philosophy of law is a branch of philosophy and jurisprudence which studies basic questions about law and legal systems, such as what is the law?, what are the criteria for legal validity?, what is the relationship between law and morality?, and many other similar questions. ...
Social equality is a social state of affairs in which certain different people have the same status in a certain respect, minimally at least in voting rights, freedom of speech and assembly, and property rights. ...
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