RD, RIP

Ronald Dworkin has died.  He was perhaps the preeminent legal philosopher of his day.  He put forth views that took on the legal positivism of H. L. A. Hart (the theory, put simply--or simplistically--that law is the rules we make, not necessarily connected to morality), believing that certain basic morality could not be ignored.  His career, in fact, was a series of jousts, going mano a mano with such names as Rawls, Rorty, Bork and Posner.

He clerked for Judge Learned Hand and Felix Frankfurter, and split his academic career between Oxford (where he had Hart's old chair) and NYU.  By all accounts, he was fun to be around.  I never met him, but read some of his books, such as Taking Rights Seriously and Law's Empire, and countless pieces in The New York Review Of Books. For a legal philosopher, he wrote with liveliness and clarity (which may not matter as much in academia, but makes a big difference to me).

He was a New Deal Democrat and it showed.  In fact, the strongest criticism of him was no matter what issue he took up--and he loved to write on controversies of the day--his philosophical investigation always ended up agreeing with what a modern-day liberal would believe.  For that matter, his arguments could sometimes be condescending, claiming his opponents didn't really understand what they were saying.  But they were well-made and generally represented the best in his tradition--he was one of the few players in the debate you couldn't ignore.