Moral force

His ground-breaking work in legal philosophy placed moral obligations at the centre of political and legal practices

If anyone had the right to be called a public intellectual in the United States, it was Professor Ronald Dworkin, the legal and constitutional scholar who died last week. Dworkin’s views on individual rights, equality, abortion, euthanasia, constitutional liberties and public policy were delivered with the kind of erudition and aplomb rarely seen nowadays in the public sphere. However, in spite of his voluminous writings on a variety of political subjects, Dworkin is best known for his groundbreaking work in legal philosophy.

Legal philosophy in the Anglophone world was revived by the great Oxford philosopher, H L A Hart, but it was Dworkin who used legal philosophy as a powerful tool of public advocacy on a scale hitherto not seen through his trenchant writing in law journals as well as in The New York Review of Books. Dworkin challenged the orthodoxy of legal positivism, which claims that a rule is a law only if it has been adopted or endorsed by a person or an institution with authority (e.g., a rule is the law because the Parliament has enacted the rule). Instead, Dworkin argued that we understand our legal obligations through a moral interpretation of our political practices. This focus on interpreting our social and political practices to understand our moral and legal duties became the defining focus of Dworkin's work. In his last few years, Dworkin attempted to answer more abstract questions in philosophy that centred on the following inquiry: how to live well? Future generations of philosophers will continue to work on the link between a life well-lived and our moral and political obligations.

We owe it to Dworkin that the manner in which judges ought to decide cases is now a major field of philosophical inquiry in the law. In defining the law, Dworkin insisted that we understand the law from a judge’s perspective — the law is that which is determined by a superhuman judge (famously called Hercules by Dworkin) interpreting past judicial decisions and legislation. While many scholars were, and still are, wary of Dworkin’s insistence on making the judge’s task of adjudicating disputes a core issue in legal philosophy, there are many others who recognise today the importance of focusing on judicial reasoning to enhance one’s understanding of the nature of law.

However, Dworkin’s work alone is an incomplete indicator of his influence on legal and political philosophers. His classroom lectures (at New York University and at Oxford University) were a spectacle of great oratory and rhetoric with his ripostes to student questions as brilliant as the substance of his lectures. To listen to his lectures was to understand, in a way one can never understand from his writing alone, the power of his inquisitive mind and the determination with which he imaginatively defended his work.

Be that as it may, Dworkin’s greatest contribution in my opinion is to romanticise the study of philosophy. To read and hear Dworkin was to get caught up with the excitement and ambition of philosophy; to gain that unique joy that one feels when someone explains what one has never thought of before. To understand Dworkin was to understand the power of philosophy to challenge and sometimes subvert tradition in any field and in the process make the philosopher question every facet of his original understanding of the world around him.

When I teach legal philosophy to students, I always assign a famous article on Hart written by Dworkin in the late sixties. Even after four decades, I still find new insights into Dworkin's ideas every time I read this article, and for this ability to provoke interesting debates on a consistent basis over a great length of time, my students and I are grateful to him.

(The author has a DPhil in legal philosophy from Oxford University and is a Principal Lecturer at BPP Law School, London)