About the author
American legal and political philosopher (1931–2013), professor at Oxford, NYU, and University College London. Dworkin was the foremost theorist of liberal rights and 'law as integrity,' a longtime critic of legal positivism, and an influential public commentator on constitutional questions in the United States.
Synopsis
Dworkin attacks the dominant positivist picture of law as a system of rules identified by a 'rule of recognition,' arguing that law also contains principles — standards of justice and fairness — that bind judges. Rights, he holds, are individual trumps over collective goals, grounded in a deeper right to equal concern and respect; and in hard cases there is, in principle, a single right answer that the best interpretation of the law yields.
Core passage idea
Paraphrase · Modern copyrighted workDworkin argues that individual rights are 'trumps' held by individuals against the collective — claims that may not be overridden merely because doing so would serve the general welfare.
The metaphor of rights as trumps captures liberalism's core commitment: that there are protections of the individual which majorities and welfare calculations may not breach. Grounding them in equal concern and respect, Dworkin makes rights — not utility — the foundation of just law.
To avoid a bubble
Pair with the legal positivism of H. L. A. Hart, whom Dworkin spent his career arguing against, and with utilitarians and majoritarians who deny that individual rights should so readily override the general welfare or democratic decision.
Reading note
Rigorous and argumentative; the essays on rules versus principles, hard cases, and rights as trumps are central. Read it directly against Hart's The Concept of Law to follow the great modern debate in legal philosophy.
Best paired with
H. L. A. Hart, The Concept of Law; John Rawls, A Theory of Justice.