Ronald Dworkin

Ronald Dworkin was without question the leading legal philosopher of his generation. A 21-year-old Rhodes scholar, Dworkin, who died Feb. 14 at 81, arrived at Oxford in 1953. It was a great time for Oxford philosophy, and though Dworkin read law with unparalleled brilliance, he was more interested in philosophy and was soon accepted by that faculty. Oxford’s brightest and most noble became his friends. After completing legal studies at Harvard, clerking for Learned Hand and briefly practicing law, he went to Yale Law School in 1962, contemporaneously with Robert Bork, with whom he occasionally co-taught, dazzlingly.

At Yale, Dworkin and his wife became stars in president Kingman Brewster’s (moderately) radical and (very) chic firmament. More important, through the influence of colleagues like Alexander Bickel and especially Harry Wellington, his view of law broadened. When in 1969 he succeeded H.L.A. Hart–who, breaking precedent, pursued him–as professor of jurisprudence at Oxford, Dworkin was already a world-class scholar whose concept that law had to be based as much on fundamental moral principles as on formal rules became a hallmark. Continuing until his death, he wrote numerous truly seminal books and articles of pure scholarship. But particularly after moving to University College London and New York University Law School, he also became the epitome of the public intellectual, opining on all the issues of the day, often in the New York Review of Books. Critics like Bork and Judge Richard Posner questioned his consistently liberal conclusions. But no one could deny the force, elegance and articulateness of his analyses.

Calabresi is a senior U.S. Court of Appeals judge and a former dean of Yale Law School