Ronald Dworkin

Ronald Dworkin was an American legal philosopher who argued that law is best understood through principles of political morality, especially rights and equality.

Interpretivism (legal theory): The view that legal propositions are true when they follow from the best moral interpretation of a community’s legal practice. Dworkin made interpretivism the core of his account of what law is.
Law as integrity: Dworkin’s view that legal decisions should express a coherent scheme of principle across a community’s legal history. This is his central account of how judges should interpret legal practice.
H. L. A. Hart: An English legal philosopher whose theory of law treats it as a system of primary and secondary rules grounded in social practice. Hart’s positivism prompted Dworkin’s sustained challenge over rules, principles, and judicial discretion.
Moral reading of the United States Constitution: Dworkin’s approach to constitutional interpretation, which reads abstract clauses as expressing moral principles. It applies his interpretivism to constitutional rights and judicial review.
Thomas Nagel: An American philosopher whose work spans ethics, political philosophy, and the philosophy of mind. Nagel’s essays on equality and justice engaged with Dworkin’s political philosophy.
Legal positivism: The theory that law’s existence and content depend on social sources, not necessarily on moral merit. Dworkin rejected the positivist separation of legal validity from moral interpretation.
Constructive interpretation: An interpretive method that presents a practice in its best light while fitting its established features. Dworkin used this method to explain how legal meaning combines fit with moral justification.
Judicial discretion: The authority of judges to choose among legally permissible outcomes when law does not dictate a single result. Dworkin denied that judges have strong discretion to make new law in hard cases.
Judicial review: The power of courts to assess whether laws or government actions comply with a constitution. Dworkin defended robust judicial review as a protection for individual rights.
Jeremy Waldron: A legal and political philosopher known for work on legislation, rights, and democratic theory. Waldron’s critique of strong judicial review challenges a central institutional implication of Dworkin’s theory.

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