Redrawing the Boundaries: R. Dvorkin’s Interpretativism in the Light of Traditional Typologies of Legal Theorizing

Abstract

Introduction: the paper is devoted to the interpretative concept of the outstanding American jurist Ronald Dworkin, formulated in his “Law’s Empire” (1986) and a number of other works. The subject of the paper is the characteristic of R. Dvorkin’s methodological approach. As its basis the author uses the interpretation of a “methodological model” of the thinker, proposed by the Mexican researcher Imer Flores, which is valuable for the effort to relate a (polemical and only partly explicit) approach of the American jurist with the classical criteria system of the typology of legal doctrines. Accordingly, the paper aims to identify (using the general scientific and specific scientific methods) R. Dworkin’s interpretativism in the context of the basic divisions of legal theories in modern Western (Anglo-American) jurisprudence, as well as to establish the impact of interpretativism on existing legaltheoretical typologies. As a result, the paper, first, outlines the key ideas of R. Dworkin’s doctrine, and secondly, examines I. Flores’s interpretation of the content and meaning of the interpretive methodology, thirdly, assesses the validity of such an interpretation with the justification of the status of interpretativism in the system of classical types of legal theorizing and its methodological implications. As a general conclusion, the paper argues for the status of R. Dworkin’s doctrine as a private and normative jurisprudence of the “internal point of view”. I. Flores’s thesis about the unification of traditional types of legal theories in interpretativism and transcending the dichotomy between positivism and natural law is disputed. Interpretativism challenges the established system of criteria for differentiating legal theories, rejecting a number of relevant methodological perspectives, primarily a general descriptive and morally neutral theory of law. By defending a necessary connection between law and morality, interpretativism, in fact, legitimizes the claims of natural-law concepts as to a proper explanation of “law as it is”, transferring their long-standing dispute with positivism to a new – methodological – level.