"It is with great sadness that we note the death of Emeritus Professor of Jurisprudence Professor Ronald Dworkin. This is a tremendous loss. We extend our deepest sympathy to Professor Dworkin’s family."
- Professor Dame Hazel Genn, Dean of UCL Faculty of Laws.
A Tribute by Professor Stephen Guest:
Professor Ronald Dworkin, who held joint appointments as a professor in Law and Philosophy with UCL Laws, the NYU School of Law and the New College of the Humanities of the University of London, died last night aged 81, in London, after suffering for some months from a rare form of leukaemia. He will be missed by many people world-wide, not just by his friends, nor just by the academic community, for through his writings in different genres and his genial and generous personality he had an enormous impact on many people beyond academia, including lawyers from all jurisdictions. He is well-known amongst judges and practising lawyers in America, Europe, Australia, South Africa, Brazil, Malaysia, China, and elsewhere.
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He was extraordinarily gifted in all directions, not just philosophy and law. He was markedly articulate both in his speech and in his writing; he had great charm and great wit; he was a cosmopolitan American who regarded London as his main home, and who knew how to enjoy things, especially music and art. Above all, it was his frighteningly high intelligence that stood out – you felt this the instant you engaged in conversation with him. That level of intelligence contributed to the charisma he exuded in the forum in which he felt most comfortable: the long and intensive academic seminar. Although Ronnie had been Visiting Professor of Jurisprudence at UCL since 1984 and had already contributed a great deal to Jurisprudence at UCL before he became Quain Professor of Jurisprudence, it was the establishment by him then of UCL’s Colloquium in Legal and Social Philosophy from which UCL most benefited. That Colloquium combined with Laws the considerable talents in the Philosophy Department and those in the newly created Department of Political Science. Those who have attended the UCL Colloquia he for so many years chaired, or their counterparts at NYU, will surely not forget the extraordinary vibrancy, energy and concentration and (sometimes at least) the moments of sudden illumination during these debates.
His writings are testimony to his knowledge of many fields of philosophy. His outstanding facility of abstraction contributed to the penetrating commentaries he would make on highly specific issues, often defined in specific court cases on constitutional law, on abortion and euthanasia, on economic analysis of tort, and other cases. Many of these issues were aired in the New York Review of Books to which he was a regular contributor for decades. It was his enviable ability to move between the very abstract and the very specific and the at times uncanny – almost deceptive – clarity with which he could express thoughts of great complexity that drove the very great contribution he has made to the culture of rights. Ronnie understood, and was able to make many of us understand with him, that in healthy cultures, the abstract principles defining the status and dignity of human beings find their practical expression in the decisions of politicians and judges.
All these attributes are displayed in his two great books. The first of these, Law’s Empire (1986) is primarily on legal philosophy. He there argued for the view that moral judgement justifies legal reasoning through the idea that law should always display integrity. The second, Justice for Hedgehogs (2011) , is primarily on moral philosophy and sums up his contributions to this field drawing on many of his other detailed and important books, Taking Rights Seriously (1977), Freedom’s Law (1996), Sovereign Virtue (2000) and Justice in Robes (2006). Justice for Hedgehogs has an Enlightenment feel. Immensely fluent, it is driven by the fierce sense that the author is teaching us something of great importance, and proclaims the intellectual independence of judgements of value, particularly moral value, from empirical judgements.
Ronnie had many worldly distinctions. He was a graduate of Yale, Oxford and Harvard and had many honorary doctorates. He was a professor at Yale before becoming the Professor of Jurisprudence at University College Oxford as the successor to Professor H.L.A. Hart (who was so taken by Ronnie’s performance in his written examinations that he kept the papers for many years). He then held the Frank H. Sommer Chair of Law and Philosophy at NYU jointly with his chair at Oxford and he remained in that Chair until very recently. He resigned from Oxford in 1998 and took up the Quain Chair of Jurisprudence at UCL and, when he retired from that, in 2006, was appointed the Jeremy Bentham Chair in Jurisprudence at UCL. Ronnie was a Fellow of the British Academy, a Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and an honorary QC. He was also awarded a number of prizes for international distinction, including, in 2005, the Jefferson Medal (US), in 2006, the Luhmann Medal (Germany), in 2007, the Holberg Prize (Norway) and, in 2012, the Balzan Prize (Switzerland).
In Memoriam: Ronald Dworkin, Dr George Letsas
Ronald Dworkin transformed the way we understand legal and political argument and in particular legal and political disagreement. I would go as far as calling it a paradigm shift in political philosophy. Modern politics can be polarized and divided over fundamental issues such as taxation, abortion, free speech and terrorism. This is particularly the case in the USA, Dworkin’s home country, but it is also the case now in most liberal democracies. It is typical to view such disagreements as conflicts between different political values, values that can win or lose electoral support, but can never be reconciled. Contrary to this cynical view, Dworkin insisted that there is something we all share every time we disagree in politics. We share a commitment to some abstract moral value – like liberty or equality- and each side is proposing a different interpretation of that value. So political debate is not about trying to get more people to support your values over the values of others, with a view to outnumber them. It is not about ‘politics’ in the derogatory sense of the word. It is about achieving the best possible interpretation of a value we all share. Disagreement is where political debate begins, not where it ends, and moral argument is central to it. We have a responsibility to ourselves and to our fellow citizens to seek the best moral understanding of the values we all share.
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Dworkin brought the same approach to bear on law, challenging the centuries-old tradition of legal positivism. He insisted, that disagreement between judges and lawyers is not about how to interpret some vague rule or how to fill-in gaps left by the legislature. Rather, it is about how best to interpret the moral value behind the very idea of legal enforcement. Legal interpretation is moral judgment all the way down.
I first met Dworkin in 1999, when I came to study jurisprudence and legal theory at UCL. I came from a scholastic background that, as is typical in continental law schools, equivocated between legal formalism and political cynicism. I was firmly of the view that the judge is either applying formal rules or promoting his own politics, and that was why I had found law rather boring as an academic subject. I still recall trying to challenge him in class, in a sophomoric way, on the idea that there are right answers in law and morality. But within only a few months I had been converted to his worldview. Not by his awe-inspiring ability as a speaker, nor by his extraordinary personality - though these qualities made him a magnetic figure. I was converted by his argument, that unless we are in the business of describing what others do (and how boring is that), everything that we do in law or politics is an attempt – implicit or explicit – to give content to some abstract moral ideal. This fascinated me as a student - it still does. It felt the same way as it must feel when one first grasps a revolutionary discovery about the world, like Einstein’s theory of relativity, or a major intellectual breakthrough like Quine’s refutation of logical positivism. Dworkin once told me, in a very modest fashion: “I am only applying to law and politics what Quine taught me about science” (Dworkin had studied philosophy under W. V. O. Quine at Harvard).
Dworkin did not just assert the moral dimension of our legal and political practices. He showed, with painstaking rigor and unmatched clarity, how each and every significant disagreement in politics turns on a particular interpretation of some abstract value. He wrote about civil disobedience, pornography, abortion, euthanasia, affirmative action, taxation, human rights, religion and many other topics, basically all the major legal and political issues of the last 50 years. In each and every of his writings he took the time to show, in clear and accessible terms, the existence of common ground in all of our disagreements and how, if we reflect on the moral value that underlies that common ground, they are resolvable. It is a distinctive feature of some of the greatest philosophers in human history – Plato, Aristotle, Kant – that they offered a complete and unified philosophical worldview. Dworkin did the same. As Nicos Stavropoulos once put it to me very aptly: “Most of us can only think about philosophical issues one at a time. We have to set one issue aside in order to reflect on the next one. Dworkin can reflect on all of them at the same time”.
I came to know Dworkin personally over the years, first as a PhD student at UCL, then as a colleague and, in the last few years, socially. He was a true intellectual, having no time for academic gossip or personal rivalries. But he would always make time for a good argument. Dworkin was a towering presence at UCL. The UCL colloquium (a twin of the NYU one that he ran with Thomas Nagel) was a high-octane intellectual laboratory. The greatest moral and political philosophers from around the world would come to UCL every year to present unpublished work in progress. It was the best show in London. Dworkin followed the Socratic style, and no speaker escaped without having his or her paper rigorously tested. A dedicated member of the audience, a medical doctor I believe, has recorded – with permission - most of the colloquium sessions between 1999 and 2007. His archive has immense philosophical value and I would urge him to make it public.
Dworkin was the greatest legal philosopher of his generation. His work has had tremendous impact in legal scholarship and it will continue to do so for decades to come. It is not too early, I think, to say that his philosophical project will be continued by critics and followers alike. For what else is there to do apart from engaging in moral argumentation? In his own words: “In the beginning and in the end, is the conviction”.
Further Tributes by the UCL Community
Further tributes to Ronald Dworkin by Cecile Laborde, Stuart Lakin, Salading Meckled-Garcia, Michael Otsuka and Eva Pils.
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Cecile Laborde, UCL
Ronald Dworkin was a towering presence at UCL. His immense skills and extraordinary personality were in full display at the Colloquium in Legal and Social Philosophy, which he chaired for many years. He impressed all present – not least the scholar whose work was being scrutinised – by his ability to extract the best, most convincing argument from the paper under discussion. He then used his considerable debating and rhetorical skills to press powerful objections, often drawn from his own legal and political philosophy. And then, long after his interlocutors had collapsed out of sheer exhaustion, there he was, still arguing about a crucial footnote over fine food and (not inconsiderable amounts of) wine. He was a true Renaissance man – philosophe, moraliste and bon viveur at once.
Stuart Lakin, University of Reading
“When I began my PhD studies at UCL, I had never before studied jurisprudence, and I had not heard of Dworkin. Other PhD students – many of whom were Dworkin’s supervisees – soon began to quiz me about my constitutional law research topic. What did I mean by law, democracy, and rights? What was my interpretation of the constitution? At first, I found these types of questions thoroughly bemusing, irrelevant, and even a little impertinent: I had studied constitutional law at leading institutions; I knew what law and democracy meant thank you very much. It took many years of reading, discussion, and colloquium attendance before the penny finally dropped. Many of us have experienced this Dworkinian ‘epiphany’. For me, it was the realisation that Dworkin’s theories had the potential to subvert the (positivistic) orthodoxy in British constitutional theory. I feel extremely fortunate and proud to have been at UCL while Dworkin was in his prime. He has influenced my thinking beyond measure”.
Salading Meckled-Garcia, UCL
One of greatest fortunes of my intellectual life was joining UCL as a senior research fellow in the second year of the ‘Dworkin Colloquium’ as it eventually became known. Attendance was one of my official duties, but I participated with enthusiasm in this intellectual marathon for the next ten years. On his retirement from the colloquium I wrote to Ronnie in personal correspondence that this had been an incomparable and exhilarating philosophical education for which I owed him a great debt of gratitude. The treatment of other people’s papers at the colloquia was always vibrant and uncompromisingly deep. Dworkin’s approach, as practiced at the NYU sister colloquium that he ran with Nagel, was to present the strongest account of the nerve of the paper, partly gleaned at lunch with the speaker, before offering subtle and often devastating criticisms. It was a sign of this generous, yet critical, approach that ledmany of the paper authors to declare that his presentation had better expressed their argument than paper itself. The long list of great figures in moral, legal, and political philosophy who accepted the invitation to present, attracted by such an incisive treatment of their work, attest to the value of getting the “Dworkin treatment.”
I also benefitted from attending the just-as-importantdinners that followed the formal colloquium. Professors, fellows, and the author of the paper would just be settling into pleasantries when Ronnie would tap his glass with a fork to bring everyone to order, and we would begin the discussion of some central idea from the paper anew. This was one of the most admirable traits in Ronnie: that the philosophical truth and its exploration to rock bottom took priority over all other things, such as academic chitchat and gossip. It was an opportunity to see political and legal philosophy at its most vibrant, as a live activity. And it was through exposure to this that I changed some of my more fundamental philosophical convictions and certainly my approach to the discipline. In my undergraduate studies I had taken on some pragmatist and positivist baggage. Here I learnt “one big thing” which was that any substantive argument, one affecting our view about the actual rights and obligations people have, in philosophy needs to be connected to moral reasons and that means propositions about one or other moral value. As simple as that premise may seem, it contains a wealth of wisdom and controversy.
In the less formal settings I also had the pleasure of experiencing Ronnie’s sparkling intellect and wry wit first hand, in addition to his insatiable curiosity about anything philosophical. I recall discussions on intuitive perception and chess mastery, a brief interrogation about the Iraq war, thoughts on primary and secondary qualities in perception theory, and one time when he passed on a witty joke about Wagner. It is a great loss to the discipline and to those of us who benefited so much from his insights that someone who knew so many things, but was capable of binding them into one big compelling world outlook, is gone.
Michael Otsuka, UCL
When he drew his last breath, Ronald Dworkin was, beyond any reasonable dispute, the greatest political philosopher alive. His most important contribution to the subject was his two-part ‘What Is Equality?’, published in Philosophy and Public Affairs in 1981, and reprinted as the first two chapters of his book Sovereign Virtue. In homage to these masterpieces, Jerry Cohen would refer to them as ‘Ronnie’s diptych’. Dworkin was also the most brilliant interlocutor in an academic setting that I’ve ever encountered. One event that stands out is a conference in London in 2001 on Sovereign Virtue, the revised proceedings of which were published in the journal Ethics. Dworkin sat at the front table from beginning to end – late morning to early evening – to respond to critic after critic, myself among them. There were six of us, and it soon became obvious that we were outnumbered by the one of him.
Eva Pils, Chinese University of Hong Kong
I have been teaching human rights and legal and political philosophy in Hong Kong for six years now, and I am just so grateful for many moments of argument and illumination during the colloquia chaired by Professor Dworkin, both at UCL and at NYU, between 2000 and 2005. Especially at UCL those colloquia were events that brought cohesion and excitement to a group of scholars at various stages of their careers, including quite a number of doctoral students who would flock to UCL from all the London colleges, as well as (in my recollection) from Oxford. Essays and chapters were written, and academic friendships formed, around our reading of the colloquia papers.
There was a sense, I think, that the very idea that law could be morally interpreted was an embattled approach, and that Ronald Dworkin – and his most understanding student, Stephen Guest -- were holding the fort. Sometimes, perhaps, there was a little too much zeal, heat, and aggressiveness in the debates; but never from Professor Dworkin himself -- not that I remember. He just enjoyed philosophical argument so much. He showed one how to do it; and I can bring back his voice on those occasions any time: a very distinctive, smiling sort of voice, happy, engaged, inquisitive, untroubled. He had a terrifically quick and confident grasp of other people's thoughts, and a wonderful ability to produce examples that helped us all see, as he might have put it, the point.
In China, I think Dworkin remains most widely known and appreciated for his very first major contribution to philosophy: his account of rights. A Chinese friend who has struggled for human rights in China, and been detained and tortured on their account, once told me about attending a class by a famous professor at a premier university in Peking. Human rights were only a subject for third-rate academics, the professor said. 'But the next day we had Ronald Dworkin visiting our campus, where he gave a lecture -- you cannot imagine the excitement, and the crowds!' I think that must have been in 2002. Dworkin never returned to China, but all his major earlier books and (already) some reviews of his last work, Justice for Hedgehogs, have been translated into Chinese.
Audio of Ronald Dworkin's Valedictory Lecture: Can we disagree about laws and morals?
End of a Golden Era?
UCL’s Colloquium in Legal & Social Philosophy : Interviews with Professors Ronald Dworkin, Jonathan Wolff and Stephen Guest
Since 1998, Professor Dworkin, whose work in the past 30 years has had a global impact on the agenda of the modern debate in legal and political philosophy, has chaired our Colloquium in Legal and Social Philosophy at which distinguished thinkers in legal and political philosophy present new research. He stepped down from the Chair of the Colloquium programme at the end of the last academic year, but will be inaugurating this year’s programme by presenting a new paper.
[ Full interview PDF Download ]
Selected Pictures of Ronald Dworkin
Ronald Dworkin: Third Edition by Stephen Guest
Ronald Dworkin is widely accepted as the most important and most controversial Anglo-American jurist of the past forty years. And this same-named volume on his work has become a minor classic in the field, offering the most complete analysis and integration of Dworkin's work to date. This third edition offers a substantial revision of earlier texts and, most importantly, incorporates discussion of Dworkin's recent masterwork Justice for Hedgehogs.
Accessibly written for a wide readership, this book captures the complexity and depth of thought of Ronald Dworkin. Displaying a long-standing commitment to Dworkin's work, Stephen Guest clearly highlights the scholar's key theories to illustrate a guiding principle over the course of Dworkin's work: that there are right answers to questions of moral value. In assessing this principle, Guest also expands his analysis of contemporary critiques of Dworkin. The third edition includes an updated and complete bibliography of Dworkin's work.
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Selected Tributes
