Ronald Dworkin, 1931–2013

The legal philosopher Ronald Dworkin saw law as an act of interpretation, inevitably—and rightly—colored by the moral precepts of those doing the interpreting. His views threw down a stiff challenge to traditional principles of judicial restraint, said George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley, and “will influence legal reasoning for generations.”

Born in Providence, R.I., Dworkin was driven to succeed even before he entered high school, said The New York Times. “I was very competitive,” he said, “one of those obnoxious people who wants to win every prize.” He won a scholarship to Harvard and then a Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford. For the rest of his life, he divided his time between the U.K. and the U.S., where he began his legal career clerking for New York federal appeals court Judge Learned Hand, “a towering figure in the law.”

After a few years in private practice, Dworkin entered academia, said The American Lawyer, teaching at Yale, New York University, Oxford, and University College, London. Students cherished his “enthusiastic and colorful” personality and his “knack for explaining legal abstractions in human terms.” Dworkin’s central point was that legal analysis of the Constitution “rests on a bedrock of the judges’ political morality,” said Bloomberg.com. How to interpret concepts like “the right to bear arms,” Dworkin argued, “depends on your moral vision for the country.” To judges like Antonin Scalia who insist on a strict textualist belief in the Constitution, this was “heresy”—but in an age of partisan rulings like Roe v. Wade and Bush v. Gore, it has become obvious that “conservatives and liberals alike interpret the Constitution in keeping with their moral preferences.”

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Dworkin was “unabashedly liberal,” said The Wall Street Journal, arguing in favor of affirmative action, assisted suicide, and abortion rights. Not surprisingly, he became a favorite target of conservative jurists. “Dworkin’s dominant bent as a public intellectual is to polemicize in favor of a standard menu of left-liberal policies,” wrote Judge Richard A. Posner in 2001. But Dworkin never minded being a lightning rod for the Right, arguing that it was all part of life’s rich offerings. “Someone who leads a boring, conventional life without close friendships or challenges or achievements…has not had a good life,” he said, “even if he thinks he has.”