Global Concepts, Local Rules, Practices of Adjudication and Ronald Dworkin’s Law as Integrity

Abstract

At the center of Ronald Dworkin's theory of law, "law as interpretation," is the method of constructive interpretation. On its face, constructive interpretation would appear to be no more than an interesting prescriptive theory of how Dworkin believes judges ought to determine the law in cases where the applicable law on the books fails to compel an inference to a single rule of decision. Dworkin, however, claims for constructive interpretation a far greater provenance. Without acknowledging the distinctiveness of these different phenomenon, Dworkin claims that constructive interpretation also identifies the current laws of a community and provides a global theory of the concept of law that applies universally as an alternative to H. L. A. Hart's global theory of the concept of law. This article sorts out these different phenomena and shows that constructive interpretation is not a sound descriptive theory for any of these phenomenon nor does it provide a useful prescriptive theory for reforming our practices in any of these areas.