Justice as Integrity: Objectivity and Social Meaning in Legal Theory

Abstract

While Dworkin views law as the embodiment of moral principles, the sources of those principles that he identifies do not supply the justification of force he ascribes to them. In this article I propose that judges interpret justice from what I call the social forms of society. I call this method justice as integrity and propose it as the foundation of law as integrity. By showing how social meanings are necessarily part of our understanding of social and natural phenomena, I hope to show that Dworkin’s political theory, and hence his legal theory, are tenable only upon a constructivist foundation of justice closer to Michael Walzer’s than his own. While this methodology better explains the moral foundations of law, I reject the metaphysical implications that both he and Dworkin ascribe to it. Constructivism does not imply ethical relativism nor does it provide any moral or epistemological barriers to criticism of social practice in one’s own society or elsewhere. I hope to make Dworkin’s constitutional theory more viable by reconceiving the objectivist pedigree of social and empirical meanings. Social meanings can create clear, objective principles that apply across a pluralistic community and permit judges to interpret justice as insiders of the social forms of their community.