Liberalism's Empire: Reflections on Ronald Dworkin's Legal Philosophy

Abstract

Ronald Dworkin's work is the most important systematic contribution to Anglo-American legal philosophy made since the mid-1960s. To say as much is to reiterate an opinion with which many legal philosophers would agree. Nevertheless, since legal philosophy has tended to become a rarefied, esoteric, and professionalized realm of discourse, many lawyers and legal scholars who are not specialists in legal theory or legal philosophy might well wonder what to make of this claim. In what sense, for example, is legal philosophy important anyway? What relationship does it, or can it, have to legal practice and to the concerns of many academic lawyers and law students? What makes a particular legal philosopher preeminent? As a preliminary to looking at Professor Dworkin's most recent major writings, it seems important to pinpoint characteristics of his work as a whole that have given rise to his preeminence. Against this background his two most recent books, which develop and extend major themes with which he has long been concerned, will be considered. Finally this essay will be concerned to identify aspects of his legal philosophy highlighted in this recent work that seem to this reviewer, whose concerns with legal theory are primarily those of a legal sociologist rather than a legal philosopher, to suggest some important limitations on the utility of the kind of legal theory Dworkin's philosophy represents.