In this reprint of Law's Empire,Ronald Dworkin reflects on the nature of the law, its given authority, its application in democracy, the prominent role of interpretation in judgement, and the relations of lawmakers and lawgivers to the community on whose behalf they pronounce. For that community, Law's Empire provides a judicious and coherent introduction to the place of law in our lives.Previously Published by Harper Collins. Reprinted (1998) by Hart Publishing.

In 1993, Professor of Jurisprudence, Ronald Dworkin of Oxford University and Professor of Law at New York University, delivered the Georgetown Law Center’s thirteenth Annual Philip A. Hart Memorial Lecture: "Life’s Dominion: An Argument About Abortion and Euthanasia." Dworkin is Professor of Philosophy and Frank Henry Sommer Professor of Law at New York University. He received B.A. degrees from both Harvard College and Oxford University, and an LL.B. from Harvard Law School and clerked for Judge Learned Hand. He was associated (...) with a law firm in New York (Sullivan and Cromwell) and was a professor of law at Yale University Law School from 1962-1969. He has been Professor of Jurisprudence at Oxford and Fellow of University College since 1969. He has a joint appointment at Oxford and at NYU where he is a professor both in the Law School and the Philosophy Department. He is a Fellow of the British Academy and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Professor Dworkin is the author of many articles in philosophical and legal journals as well as articles on legal and political topics in the New York Review of Books. He has written Taking Rights Seriously (1977), A Matter of Principle (1985), Law’s Empire (1986), Philosophical Issues in Senile Dementia (1987), A Bill of Rights for Britain (1990), Life’s Dominion (1993), and Freedom’s Law (1996). (shrink)

"The Constitution is America's moral sail, and we must hold to the courage of the conviction that fills it, a conviction that we can all be equal citizens of a moral republic. That is a noble faith, and only optimism can redeem it." So writes Ronald Dworkin in the introduction to this characteristically robust and provocative new book in which Dworkin argues the fidelity to the constitution and to law demands that judges make contemporary judgements backed on political morality, and (...) why it encourages, or ought to encourage, an open display of the true grounds of judgement. The book discusses almost all of the great constitutional issues of the last two decades including abortion, affirmative action, pornography, race, homosexuality, euthanasia and free-speech and in doing so consistently offers a liberal view of the American Constitution. Dworkin's "moral reading" proposes that we all, judges, lawyers, citizens - interpret and apply the abstract language of the Constitution on the understanding that they invoke moral principles about political decency and justice. The "moral reading" therefore brings political morality into the heart of constitutional law. The various chapters of this book were first published seperately; now drawn together they bear all the hallmarks of Dworkin's legal and philosophical sophistication, his acute understanding of political process and his understanding of history. principles. (shrink)

In «Naturalized Epistemology and the Law of Evidence Revisited», the original target article for the various refutations that I comment on here, I revisited through a slightly different lens the subject of the article that I coauthored with Brian Leiter close to twenty years ago. That article has prompted four responses from Professors Pardo, Spellman, Muffato, and Enoch. Professors Pardo and Spellman basically accept the implications of the original article and offer useful but friendly amendments. Prof. Muffato apparently does not (...) want to dispute over my ground and so changes the subject, and in doing so offers a number of interesting points. Only the fourth, Prof. Enoch, has the same doubts about the utility of my original article as I do of the genre that gave rise to it. I can thus be quite brief in discussing professors Pardo, Spellman, and Muffato, but it will take bit more effort to lay out the limits of Prof. Enoch’s analysis. (shrink)

Written by the world's best-known political and legal theorist, Freedom's Law: The Moral Reading of the American Constitution is a collection of essays that discuss almost all of the great constitutional issues of the last two decades, including abortion, euthanasia, capital punishment, homosexuality, pornography, and free speech. Professor Dworkin offers a consistently liberal view of the Constitution and argues that fidelity to it and to law demands that judges make moral judgments. He proposes that we all interpret the abstract language (...) of the Constitution by reference to moral principles about political decency and justice. His `moral reading therefore brings political morality into the heart of constitutional law. The various chapters of this book were originally published separately and are now drawn together to provide the reader with a rich, full-length treatment of Dworkin's general theory of law. (shrink)

We revisit Naturalized Epistemology and the Law of Evidence, published twenty years ago. The evolution of the relative plausibility theory of juridical proof is offered as evidence of the advantage of a naturalized approach to the study of the field and law evidence. Various alternative explanations of aspects of juridical proof from other disciplines are examined and their shortcomings described. These competing explanations are similar in their reductive, a priori approaches that are at odds with an empirically oriented naturalized approach. (...) The shortcomings of the various a priori approaches are driven by their common methodological commitments to employing weird hypotheticals to engage in intuition mining about the American legal systems that in turn ignore important aspects of the actual legal systems and consistently make impossible epistemological demands. As a result, both their descriptions of and prescriptions for American legal systems are implausible, unlike the relative plausibility theory. (shrink)

There are two ways of understanding experimental philosophy's process of appealing to intuitions as evidence for or against philosophical claims: the positive and negative programs. This chapter deals with how the positivist method of conceptual analysis is affected by the results of the negative program. It begins by describing direct extramentalism, semantic mentalism, conceptual mentalism, and mechanist mentalism, all of which argue that intuitions are credible sources of evidence and will therefore be shared. The negative program challenges this view by (...) questioning if there can be in fact a shared intuition about a specific hypothetical case, as conflicting intuitions are as likely to arise. The chapter then discusses other issues raised by the negativists such as the limits of surveys and the proper domain problem. (shrink)

Over the course of human history, the sciences, and biology in particular, have often been manipulated to cause immense human suffering. For example, biology has been used to justify eugenic programs, forced sterilization, human experimentation, and death camps—all in an attempt to support notions of racial superiority. By investigating the past, the contributors to _Biology and Ideology from Descartes to Dawkins_ hope to better prepare us to discern ideological abuse of science when it occurs in the future. Denis R. Alexander (...) and Ronald L. Numbers bring together fourteen experts to examine the varied ways science has been used and abused for nonscientific purposes from the fifteenth century to the present day. Featuring an essay on eugenics from Edward J. Larson and an examination of the progress of evolution by Michael J. Ruse, _Biology and Ideology_ examines uses both benign and sinister, ultimately reminding us that ideological extrapolation continues today. An accessible survey, this collection will enlighten historians of science, their students, practicing scientists, and anyone interested in the relationship between science and culture. (shrink)

Religious atheism? -- The universe -- Religious freedom -- Death and immortality.

The puzzle arises because propositions of law seem to be descriptive—they are about how things are in the law, not about how they should be—and yet it has proved extremely difficult to say exactly what it is that they describe. Legal positivists believe that propositions of law are indeed wholly descriptive: they are in fact pieces of history. A proposition of law in their view, is true just in case some event of a designated law-making kind has taken place, and (...) other wise not. This seems to work reasonably well in very simple cases. If the Illinois legislature enacts the words "No will shall be valid without three witnesses, "then the proposition of law, that in Illinois will needs three witnesses, seems to be true only in virtue of that historical event.But in more difficult cases the analysis fails. Consider the proposition that a particular affirmative action scheme is constitutionally valid. If that is true, it cannot be so just in virtue of the text of the Constitution and the fact of prior court decisions, because reasonable lawyers who know exactly what the constitution says and what the courts have done may yet disagree whether it is true. What are the other possibilities? One is to suppose that controversial propositions f law, like the affirmative action statement, are not descriptive at all but are rather expressions of what the speaker wants the law to be.Another is more ambitious: controversial statements are attempts to describe some pure objective or natural law, which exits in virtue of objective moral truth rather than historical decision. Both these projects take some legal statements, at least, to be purely evaluative as distinct from descriptive: they express either what the speaker prefers—his personal politics—or what he believes is objectively required b the principles of an ideal political morality. Neither of these projects is plausible because someone who says that a particular untested affirmative action plan is constitution does mean to describe the law as it is rather than as he wants it to be or thinks that, by the best moral theory, it should be. He might, indeed, say that the regrets that the plan is constitutional and thinks that, according to the best moral theory, it ought not to be.There is a better alternative: propositions of law are not simply descriptive of legal history, in a straightforward way, nor are they simply evaluative in some way divorced from legal history. They are interpretive of legal history, which combines elements of both description and evaluation but is different from both. This suggestion will be congenial, at least at first blush, to many lawyers and legal philosophers. They are used to saying that law is a matter of interpretation; but only, perhaps because they understand interpretation in a certain way. When a statute is unclear on some point, because some crucial term is vague or because a sentence is ambiguous, lawyers say that the statute must be interpreted, and they apply what they call "techniques of statutory construction." Most of the literature assumes that interpretation of a particular document is a matter of discovering what its authors meant to say in using the words they did. But lawyers recognize that on many issues the author had no intention either way and that on others his intention cannot be discovered. Some lawyers take a more skeptical position. They say that whenever judges pretend they are discovering the intention behind some piece of legislation, this is simply a smoke screen behind which the judges impose their own view of what the statute should have been.Ronald Dworkin, professor of jurisprudence at Oxford University, is the author of Taking Rights Seriously and editor of The Philosophy of Law. (shrink)

Journal of Political Philosophy, EarlyView.

The probabilistic account of juridical proof meets insurmountable problems. A better explanation of juridical proof is that it is a form of inference to the best explanation that involves the comparative plausibility of the parties’ stories. In addition, discrete evidentiary matters such as relevance and probative value are also best understood as involving inference to the best explanation rather than being probabilistic.

Echoing the debate about the nature of law that has dominated legal philosophy for several decades, this volume includes essays on the nature of law and on law not as it is but as it should be. Wherever possible, essays have been chosen that have provoked direct responses from other legal philosophers, and in two cases these responses are included. Contributors include H.L.A. Hart, R.M. Dworkin, Lord Patrick Devlin, John Rawls, J.J. Thomson, J. Finnis, and T.M. Scanlon.

L'empire du droit est le maître ouvrage de Ronald Dworkin, étudié et discuté par les professeurs et les théoriciens, par les juristes et les juges, par les étudiants et les acteurs de la vie politique aux Etats-Unis et ailleurs. Comment les juges établissent-ils le droit (et comment devraient-ils le faire)? Il montre que les juges doivent se prononcer sur les cas difficiles en interprétant, au lieu de se contenter d'appliquer, les jugements rendus antérieurement, et il énonce une théorie générale de (...) l'interprétation, en littérature comme en droit, et des cas où une interprétation doit l'emporter sur les autres. Toute interprétation juridique est le reflet d'une théorie sous-jacente sur la nature d'ensemble du droit : Ronald Dworkin évalue les mérites de trois de ces théories. L'une, le conventionnalisme, considère que le droit qui gouverne une collectivité se borne à la définition qu'en donnent les conventions en usage dans cette collectivité. Selon une autre théorie, le pragmatisme, très estimé aujourd'hui, la meilleure définition de la pratique juridique est celle d'un instrument devant aider une société à atteindre ses objectifs. Dworkin s'élève avec vigueur et avec persuasion contre ces deux points de vue et défend une troisième théorie du droit, celle du droit-intégrité. Il souligne que l'intérêt fondamental du droit n'est pas de faire état d'un consensus, ni de fournir des moyens efficaces pour parvenir aux objectifs que s'est fixés une société donnée, mais de répondre à l'exigence d'une collectivité politique agissant envers chacun de ses membres sur la base cohérente de principes définis. A la lumière de cette conception, il étudie certains cas dans le cadre de la Common Law, d'autres entrés en fonction du droit écrit, et les grands cas de droit constitutionnel soumis à la Cour suprême. Il démontre systématiquement que le concept d'intégrité politique et juridique est la clef de la théorie comme de la pratique juridiques dans le système anglo-américain. (shrink)

Using the emerging technology of large-scale textual analysis, this study examines the use of the term ‘customer satisfaction’ and its variants in the annual reports issued by publicly traded U.S. corporations and filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission as Form 10-K. We document the frequency of the term’s occurrence in 10-Ks over the 1995–2013 period and the differences in usage across industries. We then relate the term’s usage in 10-Ks to subsequent scores from the American Customer Satisfaction Index to (...) determine whether management’s discussion of customer satisfaction in financial disclosures is credible. The commitment of management to shareholders versus, more broadly, stakeholders is a central question in business ethics, and the integrity of management communication is a fundamental construct in the American Marketing Association’s Statement of Ethics. We document a complex relation between management’s discussion of customer satisfaction and subsequently reported satisfaction. We find that the general use of customer satisfaction in 10-K documents is negatively correlated with subsequent ACSI scores. However, for retail firms, when the phrase is located near words indicating measurement or monitoring of the phenomenon, the empirical relation is reversed and becomes positive. (shrink)

Alfred Betschart has claimed that the project of existential Marxism is a contradiction in terms, but this argument, even when supported by many experts and quotes from Sartre’s 1975 interview, misses the point of my Boston Review article, “The Philosophy of Our Time.” I believe the important argument today is not about whether we can prove that Sartre ever became a full-fledged Marxist, but rather about the political and philosophical possibility, and importance today, of existentialist Marxism.

Journal of Chinese Philosophy, EarlyView.

The essays in this book clarify the technical, legal, ethical, and social aspects of the interaction between eHealth technologies and surveillance practices. The book starts out by presenting a theoretical framework on eHealth and surveillance, followed by an introduction to the various ideas on eHealth and surveillance explored in the subsequent chapters. Issues addressed in the chapters include privacy and data protection, social acceptance of eHealth, cost-effective and innovative healthcare, as well as the privacy aspects of employee wellness programs using (...) eHealth, the use of mobile health app data by insurance companies, advertising industry and law enforcement, and the ethics of Big Data use in healthcare. A closing chapter draws on the previous content to explore the notion that people are 'under observation', bringing together two hitherto unrelated streams of scholarship interested in observation: eHealth and surveillance studies. In short, the book represents a first essential step towards cross-fertilization and offers new insights into the legal, ethical and social significance of being 'under observation'. (shrink)

A vast literature has developed probing the law's aversion to statistical/probability evidence in general and its rejection of naked statistical evidence in particular. This literature rests on false premises. At least so far as US law is concerned, there is no general aversion to statistical forms of proof and even naked statistics are admissible and sufficient for a verdict when the evidentiary proffer meets the normal standards of admissibility, the most important of which is reliability. The belief to the contrary (...) rests upon a series of mistakes: most importantly, mismodeling of the structure of legal systems and the nature of common law decision making. Contributing to these mistakes is the common methodology in this literature of relying on weird hypotheticals that mismodel the underlying legal relations and contain impossible epistemological demands. Collectively, these phenomena have distracted attention from issues that actually affect real legal systems. (shrink)

Forty years ago, Vaughn Ball demonstrated that the then received notion of conditional relevance served no useful purpose, as it would only come into effect if the probability of an element were 0.0. But, if the probability of an element were 0.0, a directed verdict would be in order and so once again conditional relevancy was doing no work. I extended that analysis to include the relationship between proffers of evidence and facts of consequence to demonstrate that the work that (...) conditional relevancy was supposedly doing was isomorphic to that done by relevancy in all significant ways, and yet the Federal Rules of Evidence provide different standards for the two situations to determine admissibility. I thus proposed an amendment to FRE 104(b) to provide for the same standard to be applied to ‘relevancy’ and ‘conditional relevancy’. In a recent article, Matthew Kotzen appears to subject this work to intense scrutiny and criticism, yet at the same time reaches, so far as I can tell, identical conclusions. This raises the question, which I examine, whether this is an example of cross-disciplinary difficulties in communication. (shrink)

RESUMEN Durante el siglo XVII, el reloj parece el modelo más adecuado para pensar los seres vivos. El filósofo alemán G. W. Leibniz es parte de la tradición mecanicista que concibe los seres vivos a partir del modelo del reloj o de los autómatas, pero establece una distinción esencial entre máquinas naturales y artificiales, que muestra los límites de este modelo. Las primeras son máquinas infinitamente complejas, máquinas dentro de máquinas ad infinitum, las segundas no, alcanzan un límite de complejidad. (...) Esta distinción obliga a ir más allá del reloj como modelo de los seres vivos, pues este modelo resulta insuficiente para comprender la dinámica propia de los seres vivos, en al menos dos aspectos: a) deja sin explicar el origen de la estructura o forma del ser vivo; b) no establece un principio interno de actividad que fundamente la unidad dinámica y estructural del ser vivo. Con su noción de organismo o máquina natural, Leibniz intenta resolver estas insuficiencias del modelo puramente mecánico: a) en su propuesta el ser vivo no se constituye de manera mecánica o serial, sino de una vez, por un acto de creación; b) la conservación del ser vivo en el tiempo sólo es comprensible a partir de un principio de actividad intrínseca que dota de unidad, actividad y estructura al viviente. ABSTRACT During the seventeenth century, the clock seems the most appropriate model for thinking about living beings. The German philosopher G. W. Leibniz, is part of the mechanical tradition that conceives living beings from the clock or the automata’s model, but he establishes an essential distinction between natural and artificial machines. This distinction shows the limits of the mechanical model. The machines of nature are infinitely complex machines, machines within machines ad infinitum; the artificial machines, instead, reach a limit of complexity. This distinction forces us to go beyond the clock as a model of living beings, because this model is insufficient to understand the dynamics of living beings, in at least two aspects: a) it is not able to explain the origin of the living being’s structure or form; b) it does not establish an internal principle of activity grounding the living being’s dynamic and structural unit. With his notion of organism or natural machine, Leibniz tries to solve these insufficiencies of the purely mechanical model: a) in his proposal, the living being is not constituted mechanically or serially, but at once, by an act of creation; b) the conservation of the living being in time is only understandable from a principle of intrinsic activity that provides unity, activity and structure to living beings. (shrink)