Ronald Dworkin

Ronald Myles Dworkin lived from 1931 to 2013 and was an American legal philosopher, jurist and scholar of United States constitutional law. At his death he was Frank Henry Sommer Professor of Law and Philosophy at New York University and Professor of Jurisprudence at University College London, having previously taught at Yale Law School and at Oxford, where he held the Professorship of Jurisprudence as successor to H. L. A. Hart. He received the 2007 Holberg International Memorial Prize in the Humanities, and a survey in The Journal of Legal Studies ranked him the second most-cited American legal scholar of the twentieth century. His theory of law as integrity, presented in his book Law's Empire, holds that judges interpret law in terms of consistent moral principles, especially justice and fairness, and is among the most influential contemporary theories of the nature of law; he also advocated a moral reading of the United States Constitution and an interpretivist approach to law and morality.