Ronald Dworkin's legal and political philosophy

Ronald Dworkin is one of the most important contemporary legal and political writers in the English-speaking world. This thesis analyzes the connection between Dworkin's political, moral, and jurisprudential theories. In legal circles Dworkin is best known for his celebrated "right answer" thesis which proposes that hard cases in law do have right answers. To sustain this thesis Dworkin develops a novel theory of law in which adjudication is portrayed as an interpretative exercise involving moral and political as well as strictly legal arguments. At a most fundamental level, this interpretative exercise aims at supplying a justification for the coercive force which law has within a discrete legal and political jurisdiction. In elaborating and refining this view of the law, Dworkin has assembled a number of powerful arguments intended to establish a justification for the coercive force of law in Anglo-American liberal democracies. Central to this justification is Dworkin's contention that Anglo-American liberalism is normatively constituted by a commitment to equality. Dworkin understands this core value of equality to entail, among other things, a distributive ethic centering on resource equality and a political ethic dedicated to official tolerance of different moral viewpoints. According to Dworkin, a proper apprehension of these liberal values allows one to understand how suitably conceived judgements in law are available even in hard cases where the explicit law is vague or silent.;In this thesis it is contended that Dworkin cannot consistently support his view of the law in liberal political democracies. The problem in large part lies with his understanding of liberal political morality. Taking seriously the counsel of modern deontologists, Dworkin attempts to define liberalism in terms of procedural or transactional relations rather than in terms of a shared understanding of a moral good. This procedural view of the liberal subject, however, disguises a more fundamental political value which underlies the liberal positions which Dworkin champions--the value of individual self-development. This thesis concludes that individual self-development risks being impaired rather than improved by the market-based distributive scheme and the court-centered politics which Dworkin promotes.