Bracingly liberal views

Legal scholar Ronald Dworkin, the grand old man of political correctness, died earlier this month.

Ronald Dworkin, who has been called “the greatest legal philosopher of our time,” died on February 14 in London at age 81. The New York Times’obituary called him “a public intellectual of bracingly liberal views who insisted that morality is the touchstone of constitutional interpretation.”

That’s about right. To Dworkin’s credit, he opposed legal positivism, the view that the law is whatever the sovereign says it is, and he insisted on the importance of moral principle in interpreting law, particularly the Constitution’s abstract clauses like due process and equal protection. But he also gave natural law his own spin, as he argued that there was one right or uniquely correct answer that the law provided “to most hard cases.” This he called “the moral reading” (emphasis his). Note it was not “a moral reading,” but “the moral reading.” (emphasis mine).

“Bracingly liberal views,” it turns out, was synonymous for political correctness. Dworkin taught at both New York University School of Law and University College London. He had also taught for years at Oxford University, succeeding H.L.A. Hart in the chair of jurisprudence. Over a period of almost 50 years, he wrote over a hundred articles, reviews, and letters for the New York Review of Books. The subjects ranged from affirmative action to abortion and assisted suicide, health care, and civil disobedience. During the Vietnam War, for example, he defended conscientious objectors from the draft laws.

Recently, cultural critic Joseph Epstein wrote in the Wall Street Journal on this year’s 50^th anniversary of the New York Review of Books: “In its heyday, the NYRB was a radical chic publication. Its collapse came quite as much because of the fall of high culture as it did owing to the distaste for extreme radical politics after the terrorism of 9/11. … More important, the great figures of high culture are no longer there to write for the NYRB, to lend the drearily predictable articles against Republicans and in favor of Barack Obama the cultural support they so obviously require.”

Dworkin, it seems to me, epitomizes both the rise and the fall of that publication, particularly now that he is gone. For, much like Anthony Lewis churning out predictably liberal views on law and politics for the New York Times op-eds for decades without any memorable prose or trace of humor, Ronald Dworkin was always the solemn pontificator.

Read more at Mercator.Net.