Ronald Dworkin, answered from the texts and cited to the page.
The right-answer thesis is the claim that in hard cases — cases where the rules run out, where the precedents conflict, where the parties offer competing interpretations of the same legal materials — there is nonetheless a right answer, and the judge's duty is to find it rather than to invent one.1 The pressure against this view comes from an obvious direction: if the community is deeply divided, if the legislators who enacted the relevant statute had no determinate view on the question now before the court, if reasonable lawyers disagree, does it not follow that there simply is no right answer?
I have argued the unpopular view — that the question may well have a right answer even in those circumstances — and that the occasions when a legal question genuinely has no right answer in our legal system may be much rarer than is generally supposed.2 What makes the thesis non-trivial is the account of legal reasoning that supports it. Hercules — my idealized judge of superhuman patience and skill — does not treat precedents as statutes, looking for a canonical phrase to interpret and applying it to the novel case.3
Opinions in common law rarely contain any such canonical statement, and even when they do, lawyers and judges do not think the force of a precedent is exhausted by the linguistic limits of that phrase.4 Cardozo's decision in *MacPherson v. Buick* exerted what I call a gravitational force on later decisions even where those later decisions lay entirely outside the specific orbit of the earlier ruling.5
That gravitational force is not a legislative enactment; it is something different, and a theory of adjudication must capture it. This is precisely where Hart's positivism goes wrong. Hart treated hard cases as arising because legal rules have open texture — gaps that judges fill by exercising discretion in the strong sense, essentially legislating.
But judges often disagree not simply about how a rule should be interpreted, but whether the rule one judge cites should be acknowledged as a rule at all.6 In adjudication, unlike chess, the argument for a particular rule may be more important than the argument from that rule to the particular case.7 The judge who decides by appeal to a principle no one has explicitly stated before is celebrated; the chess referee who does the equivalent is dismissed.
The practices are structurally different, and a jurisprudence built on the chess model will systematically misdescribe what courts do. Hercules, facing a hard case, sets out candidate interpretations of the relevant precedents before he reads them, asking which coherent theory of legal rights a single political official with that theory could have reached most of the results the precedents report.8
The two-dimensional test — fit and justification — then narrows the candidates: which interpretation fits the legal history best, and which shows it in its morally best light? The right answer is the one that survives that inquiry. It is not a mechanical answer, and different lawyers and judges who accept law as integrity would sometimes give different answers to the questions it asks.9
But that is no different from the situation in any domain of genuine inquiry: disagreement about the answer does not show there is no answer to be had.
I now wish to defend the unpopular view—that in the circumstances just described, the question of Tom's contract may well have a right answer—against certain arguments on which its opponents knowingly or unknowingly rely.A Matter of Principle, pp. 117–120
I shall also try to show what sense there is in the no-right-answer thesis, and why the occasions when a legal question has no right answer in our own legal system may be much rarer than is generally supposed.A Matter of Principle, pp. 117–120
Hercules could decide these hard common law cases as if earlier decisions were statutes, using the techniques he worked out for statutory interpretation. But he will encounter fatal difficulties if he pursues that theory very far.Taking Rights Seriously, p. 137
Judges and lawyers do not think that the force of precedents is exhausted, as a statute would be, by the linguistic limits of some particular phrase.Taking Rights Seriously, p. 137
He would urge that the earlier decision exerts a gravitational force on later decisions even when these later decisions lie outside its particular orbit.Taking Rights Seriously, p. 138
In fact, judges often disagree not simply about how some rule or principle should be interpreted, but whether the rule or principle one judge cites should be acknowledged to be a rule or principle at all.Taking Rights Seriously, p. 138
In adjudication, unlike chess, the argument a particular rule may be more important than the argument [from] that rule to the particular case.Taking Rights Seriously, p. 138
Hercules must find, if he can, some coherent theory about legal rights to compensation for emotional injury such that a single political official with that theory could have reached most of the results the precedents report.Law's Empire, p. 258
law as integrity consists in an approach, in questions rather than answers, and other lawyers and judges who accept it would give different answers from his to the questions it asks.Law's Empire, p. 258