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Ronald Dworkin

Analytic · North America · 1931 to 2013

American legal philosopher who held that people have rights that the wishes of the majority cannot override.

What it is

Ronald Dworkin (1931 to 2013) was an American legal philosopher. He studied at Oxford as a Rhodes scholar and at Harvard Law School, worked as a clerk to the judge Learned Hand, and then taught law and philosophy at Yale, Oxford and New York University.

He argued that law cannot be understood without morality, and that individuals hold rights that carry weight against the aims of the majority. His books and his articles in the New York Review of Books made him a public voice on law and politics as well as a scholar.

The main ideas

  • Against legal positivism. Legal positivism, the school of thought associated with his Oxford predecessor H. L. A. Hart, was the target of Taking Rights Seriously, published in the late 1970s, which built a case against it. He is often described as positivism's most significant critic.
  • Rights as trumps. His position that rights are trumps became a mainstay of legal and philosophical debate.
  • Law as integrity. In Law's Empire (1986) he proposed law as integrity: the idea that judges interpret the law in terms of consistent moral principles, so that law rests on a coherent scheme of principle.
  • A moral reading of the constitution. In Freedom's Law (1996) he advocated what he called the moral reading of the American Constitution.
  • One account of value. In Justice for Hedgehogs (2011) he presented a unified account of his ideas about ethics, morality and law.

What it looks like in practice

Imagine a town council that votes to close a small bookshop because most residents find it a nuisance. Dworkin would ask whether the minority has a right that the vote cannot simply override, and then ask what principle of fairness and equal respect the town's own laws already rest on. This is an illustration of his line of questioning, not a passage from his writing.

Books and moments

  • Taking Rights Seriously (late 1970s) argues against legal positivism and for rights that outweigh majority wishes.
  • A Matter of Principle (1985) and Law's Empire (1986) are further books of his legal and political philosophy.
  • Freedom's Law (1996), Sovereign Virtue (2000) and Justice in Robes (2006) are three more of his books, on the Constitution, equality and legal theory.
  • Justice for Hedgehogs (2011) draws his ideas on ethics, morality and law together.

Questions and criticism

  • Are there right answers? Law as integrity asks judges to find the principles that best fit and justify the law. Whether that fixes an answer in hard cases, or only gives a way of arguing about them, is left open here.
  • Law and morality. The dispute with positivists is about whether what the law is can be separated from what it ought to be. Dworkin's side of that argument is set out here, and the debate itself has not been closed.
  • Whose rights? If rights are trumps over the majority, it is fair to ask who decides what the rights are, and by what authority.

Close neighbours

The page on H. L. A. Hart covers the positivist view he argued against, and the page on Thomas Nagel, who also taught at New York University, sits beside his in the same field of political and moral philosophy.

Written by epchē in our own words, and checked against independent sources on 29 October 2026. The sources are listed below.

Who they connect to

Influenced by

  • John Rawls · He took up Rawls's idea that each person is owed equal concern and respect.

Reacted against

  • H. L. A. Hart · Dworkin attacked Hart's view that law is only a set of rules, and argued that moral principles are part of law.

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