Ronald Dworkin — a giant among law professors — has died.

He was 81.

His legal arguments were subtly presented applications to specific problems of a classic liberal philosophy which, in turn, was grounded in his belief that law must take its authority from what ordinary people would recognise as moral virtue....

Perhaps Dworkin's greatest achievement was his insistence on a rights-based theory of law, expounded in his first and most influential book, Taking Rights Seriously (1977), in which he proposed an alternative both to Hart's legal positivism and to the newly minted theories of the Harvard philosopher of law John Rawls....

He remained an unapologetic, indeed proud, liberal Democrat, unshaken in his loyalty to the New Deal tradition set by his hero Franklin D Roosevelt, even as such ideas became less and less widely held. It is possible that this shifting of the political centre of gravity under him deprived him of a more prominent career as a public intellectual.

Read the whole thing. Click on the Dworkin tag to see what we were saying about him while he was alive.

When I went to law school beginning in 1978, at NYU — where Dworkin taught — nothing was taken more seriously than "Taking Rights Seriously." That was just before the outburst that was Critical Legal Studies, in a time and a place where we were expected to believe that rights were real. Shame on you if you suspected they were inventions of judges.

"Reagan's Justice" — an ominous New York Review of Books article about Robert Bork.

I remembered the title of the scary piece (by Ronald Dworkin), which was published in 1984, and I remembered the uber-creepy David Levine caricature that accompanied it:



After Bork got borked, Dworkin got another piece in the NYRB — "What does Bork’s defeat mean? Did the American public reject Bork’s announced philosophy of original intention? If so, what alternative constitutional philosophy, if any, did the public endorse?" — and David Levine drew him again. Look how cute:



Now that he's not a threat, he's a lovable Santa Claus. That's art, baby!

AND: From high(ish) art to low, here's an old Letterman Top 10 list: "Top 10 Names for Robert Bork's Beard":

Ronald Dworkin finds it "regrettable that the general public takes so little interest in the Supreme Court" and thinks that's why the Obama campaign "rarely mentions" it.

Here's his big essay in the NYRB.

I think the Obama campaign avoids that issue because its research says that people want judges that interpret the Constitution based on text and original meaning/intent. Obama's vulnerable on the Supreme Court question. He benefits from whatever lack of interest can be maintained.

"[T]he silly and democratically harmful fiction that a judge can interpret the key abstract clauses of the United States Constitution..."

"... without making controversial judgments of political morality in the light of his or her own political principles."

By embracing that fiction — Ronald Dworkin says — Sonia Sotomayor squandered a precious opportunity to talk to people seriously about what constitutional intepretation really is.

The NYT asks "7 legal experts to pose the questions they would like to hear [Sonia Sotomayor] answer."

There are: Stanford lawprof Kathleen M. Sullivan (who asks about the use of federalism to achieve progressive ends and the Supreme Court's response to the detainees), former secretary of homeland security Michael Chertoff (who asks about the influence of evidence, foreign law, and personal sympathy on judicial decisions), Yale lawprof Stephen L. Carter (who focuses on the limitations of the confirmation hearings, asks for the naming of a favorite Supreme Court Justice, and wonders whether Sotomayor will do something about the way these Supreme Court Justices today snipe at each other), former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales (who asks whether "there is a difference between doing justice and applying the law" and whether Justices should take into account the way the United States is perceived around the world and what the standard is for overruling precedent), NYU lawprof Ronald Dworkin (who goads Sotomayor into admitting that judges can't decide cases by just "applying the law" and that it's okay for for government to have race-based policies that "reduce racial inequality and tension"), author James MacGregor Burns (who asks if Sotomayor believes in the notion of a living Constitution and whether the Constitution should be changed to abolish the power of judicial review and to require Justices to retire at age 70)... and me, your humble lawprof blogger (asking whether Sotomayor meant that "wise Latina" remark to be taken seriously, whether the Supreme Court will be better with a diverse array of Justices, and whether we ought to take note of the "extreme overrepresentation" of Catholics on the Court).