{"agent_id":"dworkin","agent_name":"Ronald Dworkin","slug":"law-as-integrity","label":"Law as integrity: do judges in hard cases find the right answer by interpreting legal practice in its best light, or do they make discretionary choices the way Hart's positivism describes?","topic":"Law as integrity","question":"Do judges in hard cases find the right answer by interpreting legal practice in its best light, or do they make discretionary choices the way Hart's positivism describes?","position":"Law as integrity is the central jurisprudential virtue. Judges in hard cases — cases where the rules run out, where the precedents conflict, where the parties offer competing interpretations of the same legal materials — must decide by finding the principles that both *fit* the legal history and *justify* it morally. *Hercules*, the ideal judge with unlimited time and information, would on this view arrive at *the right answer* in every hard case. He is not a literal description of how flesh-and-blood judges work; he is the standard of what good adjudication aspires to. The two-dimensional test is rational reconstruction, not psychological report. H. L. A. Hart's positivism — the rule of recognition, the plain-fact pedigree thesis, the claim that judges in hard cases exercise discretion in the strong sense — misdescribes legal practice; it treats judges as legislators in the gaps when they are not. Joseph Raz's pluralism about legal values, with its objection that integrity cannot speak with one voice because law's values are genuinely plural, also fails: integrity does require coherence, and the cost of incoherence in legal practice is real. Richard Posner's pragmatism, which would have judges decide by reckoning consequences without principle, abandons the jurisprudential project altogether. The competing positions name a real disagreement about what law is, and I have argued the integrationist position across four decades.","paragraphs":[[{"t":"Law as integrity is the central jurisprudential virtue.","n":[]},{"t":"Judges in hard cases — cases where the rules run out, where the precedents conflict, where the parties offer competing interpretations of the same legal materials — must decide by finding the principles that both *fit* the legal history and *justify* it morally. *Hercules*, the ideal judge with unlimited time and information, would on this view arrive at *the right answer* in every hard case.","n":[1,2]}],[{"t":"He is not a literal description of how flesh-and-blood judges work; he is the standard of what good adjudication aspires to.","n":[]},{"t":"The two-dimensional test is rational reconstruction, not psychological report.","n":[]},{"t":"H.","n":[]},{"t":"L.","n":[]},{"t":"A.","n":[]},{"t":"Hart's positivism — the rule of recognition, the plain-fact pedigree thesis, the claim that judges in hard cases exercise discretion in the strong sense — misdescribes legal practice; it treats judges as legislators in the gaps when they are not.","n":[]}],[{"t":"Joseph Raz's pluralism about legal values, with its objection that integrity cannot speak with one voice because law's values are genuinely plural, also fails: integrity does require coherence, and the cost of incoherence in legal practice is real.","n":[]},{"t":"Richard Posner's pragmatism, which would have judges decide by reckoning consequences without principle, abandons the jurisprudential project altogether.","n":[]}],[{"t":"The competing positions name a real disagreement about what law is, and I have argued the integrationist position across four decades.","n":[3,4,5]}]],"texts":"*Taking Rights Seriously* (Harvard, 1977) Chs. 2-4 on legal principles, rules, and hard cases; *A Matter of Principle* (Harvard, 1985) Chs. 5-8 on interpretation and natural law; *Law's Empire* (Belknap Harvard, 1986) Chs. 6-7 — the canonical statement of integrity, the chain-novel analogy, Hercules; *Justice in Robes* (Belknap Harvard, 2006) Ch. 7 (the reply to Hart's posthumous Postscript). Reception: H. L. A. Hart, *The Concept of Law* (Oxford, 1961; 2nd ed. with Postscript 1994) — the lifelong opponent; Joseph Raz's pluralism about legal values and the 'one voice' critique of integrity in *Dworkin and His Critics* (Blackwell, 2007) Ch. 15; Jules Coleman, *The Practice of Principle* (Oxford, 2001); Andrei Marmor, *Interpretation and Legal Theory* (Hart, 2005); Brian Leiter, *Naturalizing Jurisprudence* (Oxford, 2007) on the case for legal positivism; Scott Shapiro, *Legality* (Belknap Harvard, 2011) on planning theory; Gerald Postema and Jeremy Waldron's substantive engagements in *Dworkin and His Critics* Chs. 16-17; Stephen Guest, *Ronald Dworkin* (Stanford UP, 3rd ed. 2012) Chs. 1-3, the principal modern sympathetic reading.","works":["*Taking Rights Seriously* (Harvard, 1977) Chs. 2-4 on legal principles, rules, and hard cases","*A Matter of Principle* (Harvard, 1985) Chs. 5-8 on interpretation and natural law","*Law's Empire* (Belknap Harvard, 1986) Chs. 6-7 — the canonical statement of integrity, the chain-novel analogy, Hercules","*Justice in Robes* (Belknap Harvard, 2006) Ch. 7 (the reply to Hart's posthumous Postscript)"],"reception":"H. L. A. Hart, *The Concept of Law* (Oxford, 1961; 2nd ed. with Postscript 1994) — the lifelong opponent; Joseph Raz's pluralism about legal values and the 'one voice' critique of integrity in *Dworkin and His Critics* (Blackwell, 2007) Ch. 15; Jules Coleman, *The Practice of Principle* (Oxford, 2001); Andrei Marmor, *Interpretation and Legal Theory* (Hart, 2005); Brian Leiter, *Naturalizing Jurisprudence* (Oxford, 2007) on the case for legal positivism; Scott Shapiro, *Legality* (Belknap Harvard, 2011) on planning theory; Gerald Postema and Jeremy Waldron's substantive engagements in *Dworkin and His Critics* Chs. 16-17; Stephen Guest, *Ronald Dworkin* (Stanford UP, 3rd ed. 2012) Chs. 1-3, the principal modern sympathetic reading.","status":"The Hart-Dworkin debate is the central debate of twentieth-century analytic legal philosophy. Hart's posthumous Postscript to the second edition of *The Concept of Law* (Oxford, 1994) treats Dworkin as having misunderstood positivism; Dworkin's reply in *Justice in Robes* (2006) Ch. 7 treats Hart's response as inadequate. The post-Hart positivist tradition (Joseph Raz, Jules Coleman, Andrei Marmor, Brian Leiter, Scott Shapiro) has developed inclusive legal positivism, exclusive legal positivism, and planning theory in response to Dworkin's critique; the field has not converged. The Burley volume Ch. 15-17 (Raz, Postema, Waldron) is the principal recent engagement with integrity. Stephen Guest's *Ronald Dworkin* (Stanford UP, 3rd ed. 2012) is the canonical sympathetic monograph. The American successors in interpretive theory include Mark Greenberg's *The Moral Impact Theory of Law* and Scott Hershovitz's work on the conceptual structure of law.","era":"1931-2013","discipline":"Philosophy","refs":[{"n":1,"work":"Law's Empire","page":"pp. 430–431","canonical":"","quote":"I made Hercules decide the several cases I offered as working examples in Chapter 1, and my claims of fit can be checked by comparing his reasoning with the kind of arguments that seemed appropriate to lawyers and judges on both sides of those cases.","label":"Law's Empire, pp. 430–431"},{"n":2,"work":"Law's Empire","page":"pp. 429–430","canonical":"","quote":"The interpretive judgment must notice and take account of these several dimensions; if it does not, it is incompetent or in bad faith, ordinary politics in disguise. But it must also meld these dimensions into an overall opinion: about which interpretation, all things considered, makes the community's legal record the best it can be from the point of view of political morality.","label":"Law's Empire, pp. 429–430"},{"n":3,"work":"Law's Empire","page":"p. 273","canonical":"","quote":"This process is in fact under way in Anglo-American law, as is, though less securely, a new unification of private law that blurs even the long-established and once much firmer boundary between In the next three chapters we continue constructing Hercules' working theory of law as integrity by exploring in more detail issues raised in three departments of adjudication: common-law cases, cases turning on statutes, and…","label":"Law's Empire, p. 273"},{"n":4,"work":"Law's Empire","page":"p. 258","canonical":"","quote":"They are the answers I now think best. But 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. You might think other answers would be better.","label":"Law's Empire, p. 258"},{"n":5,"work":"Justice in Robes","page":"p. 192","canonical":"","quote":"We prefer an account of what law is, and of how it is to be identified, that incorporates the value—integrity—whose pertinence and importance we recognize. If one way of deciding Mrs. Sorenson's case will treat her as equal before the law, in the sense that integrity assumes, and another will not, then we prefer a conception of legality that encourages the first and discourages the second decision.","label":"Justice in Robes, p. 192"}],"answer":null,"siblings":[{"slug":"rights-as-trumps","label":"Rights as trumps: do individuals hold rights against the collective that cannot be defeated by appeals to aggregate welfare, or are rights themselves derivable from utility calculations?"},{"slug":"equality-of-resources","label":"Equality of resources: is the right metric of distributive justice resources or welfare, and what does Cohen's expensive-taste objection do to the resources view?"},{"slug":"the-moral-reading-of-the-constitution","label":"The moral reading of the Constitution: do judges have the duty to give the abstract clauses their best moral interpretation, or should they decline that responsibility through originalism or minimalism?"},{"slug":"the-hedgehog-thesis","label":"The hedgehog thesis: is there a unity of value across ethics, morality, political philosophy, and law, or are these separate domains with potentially incommensurable claims?"}]}