Dworkin and interpretivism

Law is not a system of rules identifiable by social facts but an interpretive practice demanding constructive interpretation that presents the community's coercive practices in their best moral light. Against Hart's separation thesis, Dworkin's law as integrity requires judges to articulate principles that both fit past legal decisions and justify them morally, treating law as a coherent, principled whole. Legal propositions are true not by virtue of social conventions but when they follow from the best moral-political interpretation of institutional history. The central mechanism: judges must identify the theory that best satisfies the dual constraints of fit (accounting for settled law) and justification (showing law in its best light), making legal reasoning inherently evaluative yet institutionally constrained.

Riggs v Palmer 115 NY 506 (1889): Murderer-legatee barred from inheritance despite statutory silence; court invoked principle that 'no one may profit from his own wrong'. Paradigmatic for Dworkin: the principle was legally binding, not discretionary policy—law includes moral principles beyond positive rules.

McLoughlin v O'Brian [1983] 1 AC 410: Lord Scarman's speech exemplified Dworkinian reasoning by surveying principle and precedent, emphasising coherence and incremental development. Shows English judges reason interpretively, seeking principled consistency rather than mechanical rule-application.

Brown v Board of Education 347 US 483 (1954): Best interpretation of equal protection clause, in light of principles of dignity and equal citizenship, forbids segregation. Not judicial activism but principled interpretation—the Constitution's abstract clauses incorporate moral principles requiring substantive interpretation.

R v R [1992] 1 AC 599: House of Lords abolished marital rape exemption. For Dworkin, judges interpreted law in light of evolving principles of bodily autonomy and sexual equality—the exemption never cohered with best principles, so was never truly law.

Henningsen v Bloomfield Motors 161 A 2d 69 (NJ 1960): Court struck down warranty disclaimer citing fairness and unconscionability. Illustrates integrity: making contract law cohere with broader principles of consumer protection and equal bargaining power.

Courts applying Dworkinian methodology follow these steps: (1) Survey all relevant legal materials—statutes, precedents, constitutional provisions; (2) Construct competing theories that might explain and justify these materials; (3) Apply the threshold test of fit—eliminate theories that cannot account for settled law; (4) Among theories meeting the fit threshold, select the one offering best justification—making law most coherent with principles of political morality; (5) Deduce the outcome required by that theory. Judges act as both authors and interpreters in a 'chain novel', constrained by earlier chapters but responsible for coherence. Common triggers include: cases where rules conflict with principles (Riggs); evolving social values requiring reinterpretation (R v R); abstract constitutional clauses demanding moral reading (Brown). The method is explicitly anti-discretionary: judges discover pre-existing rights through principled interpretation, not policy choices.

Conflating with natural law: Dworkin grounds law in constructive interpretation of institutional practices, not timeless moral principles—he's an interpretivist, not a natural lawyer. Misreading right-answer thesis: It's a regulative ideal that judges must seek the right answer, not an empirical claim they always find it—disagreement reflects difficulty, not indeterminacy. Ignoring fit constraint: Students focus on moral justification but overlook that theories failing to account for settled law are disqualified—fit preserves law's institutional character. Treating Hercules as descriptive: Hercules models the aspiration of adjudication, not actual judicial capacity—the ideal illuminates the structure of legal reasoning.