25 Facts About Ronald Dworkin

Ronald Myles Dworkin was an American legal philosopher, jurist, and scholar of United States constitutional law.

Ronald Dworkin advocated a "moral reading" of the United States Constitution, and an interpretivist approach to law and morality.

Ronald Dworkin was a frequent commentator on contemporary political and legal issues, particularly those concerning the Supreme Court of the United States, often in the pages of The New York Review of Books.

Ronald Dworkin was born in 1931 in Providence, Rhode Island, United States, the son of Madeline and David Dworkin.

Ronald Dworkin then clerked for Judge Learned Hand of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit.

Ronald Dworkin was Frank Henry Sommer Professor of Law at New York University School of Law and professor of philosophy at New York University, where he taught from the late 1970s.

Ronald Dworkin had regularly contributed, for several decades, to The New York Review of Books.

Ronald Dworkin delivered the Oliver Wendell Holmes Lecture at Harvard, the Storrs Lectures at Yale, the Tanner Lectures on Human Values at Stanford, and the Scribner Lectures at Princeton.

Ronald Dworkin 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 moral merits, and he rejects the whole institutional focus of positivism.

Ronald Dworkin's theory is "interpretive": the law is whatever follows from a constructive interpretation of the institutional history of the legal system.

Ronald Dworkin argues that moral principles that people hold dear are often wrong, even to the extent that certain crimes are acceptable if one's principles are skewed enough.

All interpretation must follow, Ronald Dworkin argues, from the notion of "law as integrity" to make sense.

Out of the idea that law is "interpretive" in this way, Ronald Dworkin argues that in every situation where people's legal rights are controversial, the best interpretation involves the right answer thesis, the thesis that there exists a right answer as a matter of law that the judge must discover.

Ronald Dworkin opposes the notion that judges have a discretion in such difficult cases.

Ronald 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 people have legal rights even in cases where the correct legal outcome is open to reasonable dispute.

Ronald Dworkin's Judge Hercules, on the other hand, is a purely idealized construct, that is, if such a figure existed, he would arrive at a right answer in every moral dilemma.

Ronald Dworkin has been a long-time advocate of the principle of the moral reading of the Constitution whose lines of support he sees as strongly associated with enhanced versions of judicial review in the federal government.

Ronald Dworkin has made important contributions to what is sometimes called the equality of what debate.

Ronald Dworkin 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.

Ronald Dworkin later married Irene Brendel, the former wife of pianist Alfred Brendel.

Ronald Dworkin died of leukemia in London on February 14,2013, at the age of 81, survived by his second wife, two children, and two grandchildren.

In September 2007, Ronald Dworkin was awarded the Holberg International Memorial Prize.

The award citation of the Holberg Prize Academic Committee recognized that Ronald Dworkin has "elaborated a liberal egalitarian theory" and stressed Ronald Dworkin's effort to develop "an original and highly influential legal theory grounding law in morality, characterized by a unique ability to tie together abstract philosophical ideas and arguments with concrete everyday concerns in law, morals, and politics".

On November 14,2012, Ronald Dworkin received the Balzan Prize for Jurisprudence in Quirinale Palace, Rome, from the President of the Italian Republic.

Ronald Dworkin was elected a fellow of the British Academy, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Philosophical Society.