Ronald Dworkin, answered from the texts and cited to the page.
Rights are political trumps held by individuals against the collective.1 A right does not enter the cost-benefit calculation as one more factor to be weighed against collective welfare; it has a different normative structure. To say that someone has a right to free speech is to say that the government may not silence her for the sake of modest gains in collective welfare, even when the utilitarian calculus would justify the silencing on consequence-based grounds.23
The right blocks that move; it does not enter the calculus and lose to it. The thesis runs through Taking Rights Seriously (1977) and is foundational to everything else: to the integrity of legal practice (the Hercules judge respects established rights regardless of the social-utility consequences); to the moral reading of the Constitution (constitutional rights are not weighted against governmental interests on a continuous scale, even where strict-scrutiny doctrine has come to look like such weighing); to the partnership conception of democracy (democratic majorities cannot legitimately defeat the rights of individuals on the same scale as they decide ordinary policy questions).4
The utilitarian and economic- analysis traditions, which reduce rights to derivative considerations from aggregate welfare, miss what rights are.5
When we come to political morality, however, rights plainly provide a better focus than duties or obligations, because their location is more precise: individuals have political rights, and some of those rights, at least, are matched only by collective duties of the community as a whole rather than of particular individuals. We begin with the idea of a political right itself: its nature and force.Justice for Hedgehogs, pp. 328–329
The claim that citizens have a right to free speech must imply that it would be wrong for the Government to stop them from speaking, even when the Government believes that what they will say will cause more harm than good. The claim cannot mean, on the prisoner-of-war analogy, only that citizens do no wrong in speaking their minds, though the Government reserves the right to prevent them from doing so.Taking Rights Seriously, p. 231
Those latter policies violate political rights—the right to free speech and not to be punished without a fair trial. This trump sense of a right is the political equivalent of the most familiar sense in which the idea is used in personal morality. I might say, "I know you could do more good for more people if you broke your promise to me.Justice for Hedgehogs, pp. 329–330
Some legal rights, which we call constitutional rights, have a special force and role: they prevent government from enacting laws or adopting polithat would otherwise seem attractive. The First Amendment to the United States Constitution creates legal rights of that kind; it gives citizens a right to speak that government may not abridge even when it would be in the general interest to do so.Is Democracy Possible Here, pp. 30–31
On the contrary, opposition from the left and the right is united in condemning the ruling theory for its excessive concern, as they take it to be, with the fate of individuals as individuals. The idea of individual rights, in the strong sense in which that idea is defended in this book, is for them simply an exaggerated case of the disease from which the ruling theory already suffers.Taking Rights Seriously, pp. 6–7
The rights-as-trumps thesis is foundational to liberal political philosophy in the late twentieth century and runs alongside Rawls's priority-of-liberty argument in A Theory of Justice (1971) as one of the two great anti- utilitarian moves of that era. The thesis has been challenged on technical grounds: Jeremy Waldron, Frederick Schauer, and Richard Pildes have asked whether rights are best understood as absolute trumps, defeasible trumps, or pro tanto reasons; the literature has refined the original metaphor. The substantive thesis — that rights have a different normative structure from collective welfare and cannot be weighed against it on the same scale — remains widely accepted by liberal theorists and remains contested by utilitarians, economic analysts of law, and pragmatists. The relation between rights-as- trumps and the partnership conception of democracy developed in Is Democracy Possible Here? (2006) and Justice for Hedgehogs (2011) is itself contested: some readers (including Burley editors) see the late partnership view as softening the early trumps view; others (Guest, Stanford UP 3rd ed. 2012) read the two as complementary moments of a single position.