A Matter of Principle

by Ronald Dworkin

This is a book about the interplay of urgent political issues and hotly debated questions of moral philosophy. The controversies it joins are old; but history has given them fresh shape. For example, whether judges should and do make law is now of more practical importance than ever before, as recent presidents have appointed enough justices to the Supreme Court to set its character for a generation.

With forceful style, Ronald Dworkin addresses questions about the Anglo-American legal system as protector of individual rights and as machinery for furthering the common good. He discusses whether judges should make political decisions in hard cases; the balancing of individual rights versus the good of the community; whether a person has the right to do what society views as wrong; and the meaning of equality in any framework of social justice. Dworkin strongly opposes the idea that judges should aim at maximizing social wealth. It is his conviction that the area of discretion for judges is severely limited, that in a mature legal system one can always find in existing law a “right answer” for hard cases.

Dworkin helps us thread our way through many timely issues such as the rights and privileges of the press under the First Amendment. He reviews the Bakke case, which tested affirmative action programs. These essays also examine civil disobedience, especially in nuclear protests, and bring new perspective to the debate over support of the arts.

Above all, this is a book about the interplay between two levels of our political practical problems and philosophical theory, matters of urgency and matters of principle. The concluding essay on press freedom expands the discussion of conflict between principle and policy into a warning. Though some defenders of the press blend the two in order to expand freedom of speech, the confusion they create does disservice to their aim and jeopardizes the genuine and fragile right of free speech. We stand in greater danger of compromising that right than of losing the most obvious policy benefits of powerful investigative reporting and should therefore beware the danger to liberty of confusing the two. The caution is general. If we care so little for principle that we dress policy in its colors when this suits our purpose, we cheapen principle and diminish its authority.

Genres: Philosophy, Law, Nonfiction, Politics, Legal

425 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1985

About the author

Ronald Dworkin, QC, FBA was an American philosopher of law. He was a Jeremy Bentham Professor of Law and Philosophy at University College London, Frank Henry Sommer Professor of Law at New York University, and has taught previously at Yale Law School and the University of Oxford. An influential contributor to both philosophy of law and political philosophy, Dworkin received the 2007 Holberg International Memorial Prize in the Humanities for "his pioneering scholarly work" of "worldwide impact." His theory of law as integrity is amongst the most influential contemporary theories about the nature of law.

Reviews

[Soha Bayoumi]

This book is a collection of articles by Ronald Dworkin. It is a very interesting book to read in light of the crisis of liberal politics and theories in the eighties coinciding with the rise of the 'Reagan Revolution' and neoconservatism in general in the Anglo-American world. The book is centered around an attempt to define what liberalism is and is not in that context, to differentiate between 'constitutive' and 'derivative' positions of liberalism, as well as between 'matters of policy' and 'matters of principle'. If you don't allow yourself though to be swept by Dworkin's famously forceful style and fascinating rhetoric, you'll find that many of the distinctions he struggles to elaborate are arbitrary and rhetorical. All in all, the book is worth reading from a Critical-Theory point of view contextualising ideas and theories and examining the effect of political and economic circumstances on the elaboration of theories and knowledge.