Dworkin, Ronald Myles, 1931–2013, American legal philosopher. b. Worcester, Mass. A professor at Yale (1962–75), Oxford (1969–98), New York Univ. (1975–2013), and University College London (1998–2013), Dworkin's work such as Taking Rights Seriously (1977) rejects the positivist conceptions of law prevalent among legal realists and posits that rights are premised upon a comprehensive set of moral precepts that make individual rights comprehensible. A regular contributor to the New York Review of Books and frequent commentator on constitutional questions, Dworkin criticized as unworkable Robert Bork's notion of basing contemporary jurisprudence on the “original intent” of the authors of the constitution. His other works include A Matter of Principle (1985), Law's Empire (1986), Life's Dominion (1993), and Freedom's Law: The Moral Reading of the American Constitution (1996). Justice for Hedgehogs (2011) is a summing up of his work in the law and moral and political philosophy.
The Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia, 6th ed. Copyright © 2024, Columbia University Press. All rights reserved.
See more Encyclopedia articles on: Law: Biographies
