On "Policy" In Dworkin's Legal Theory

This thesis aims at clarifying Ronald Dworkin's conception of policy,namely,what is policy,what connections there are between policy and principle,and,is policy law.The answers to aforesaid questions lays within the understanding about Dworkin's general theory of law.Dworkin divided,in his Justice in Robes,the stages of general theory of law into four,the semantic stage,the jurisprudence stage,the doctrinal stage and the adjudication stage.This division reflects a path from the general to the particular,from the abstract to the concrete,and from legal conceptions to the theory of adjudication.Dworkin's own development of such theory,however,originated from his concern over hard cases,that is,a concern over the propositions of law.Therefore,Dworkin's legal theory is taken as a theory about the propositions of law and their grounds.If we believe that Dworkin successfully constructed his �unitary theory of law�,then this theory must consist a certain approach of the individuation of law,which,in Dworkin's theory,regards a proposition of law as a complete statement of a law.Policies,however,arisen within as a certain social fact.Therefore,Dworkin's noted assert on how argument of policy shall be disregarded in adjudication shall be understand,on the conceptual level,as that policy is not law because it cannot really justify a proposition of law at the doctrinal stage.As for the nature of policy,the very premise to the aforesaid assert would be Dworkin's claim on the distributional character,an angle of asking that concerned with individuals,and according to which,any collective goal can be individuated as an individual right,and an argument of policy can be taken as an argument of principle in this regard.Therefore,Dworkin's conception of policy shall be taken as followings: Policy,as a social fact,can be taken as principle that has an appropriate distributional character and reflects the values required by integrity during the constructive interpretation.And as such,Dworkin's exclusion of policy from the concept of law reflects an essential disagreement between him and the positivism: is the identification of law a pure question of social fact.