Ronald Dworkin

Quotes

• “Discretion, like the hole in a doughnut, does not exist except as an area left open by a surrounding belt of restriction. It is therefore a relative concept. It always makes sense to ask, "Discretion under which standards?" or "Discretion as to which authority?"”
• “'Nixon is no longer president, and his crimes were so grave that no one is likely now to worry very much any more about the details of his own legal philosophy. Nevertheless in what follows I shall use the name 'Nixon' to refer, not to Nixon, but to any politician holding the set of attitudes about the Supreme Court that he made explicit in his political campaigns. There was, fortunately, only one real Nixon, but there are, in the special sense in which I use the name, many Nixons.'”
• “She ends her letter, characteristically, by picturing me and her other critics as indifferent to the suffering of women. But many feminists, including several who wrote or spoke to me about my review, regret her single-minded concentration on lurid sex. They think that though it has predictably attracted much publicity, it tends to stereotype women as victims, and takes attention from still urgent questions of economic, political, and professional equality.”
• “Perhaps MacKinnon should reflect on these suggestions that the censorship issue is not so simple-minded, so transparently gender-against-gender, as she insists. She should stop calling names long enough to ask whether personal sensationalism, hyperbole, and bad arguments are really what the cause of sexual equality now needs.”
• “If we are to be morally and ethically responsible, there can be no turning back once we find, as we have found, that some of the most basic presuppositions of these values are mistaken. Playing God is indeed playing with fire. But that is what we mortals have done since Prometheus, the patron saint of dangerous discoveries. We play with fire and take the consequences, because the alternative is cowardice in the face of the unknown.”

via Wikiquote · CC BY-SA

Key facts

Born

Ronald Myles Dworkin , ( 1931-12-11 ) December 11, 1931, Worcester, Massachusetts , U.S.

Died

February 14, 2013 (2013-02-14) (aged 81), London , England

Awards

Henry J. Friendly Medal (2005), Holberg International Memorial Prize (2007), Balzan Prize (2012)

Education

Harvard University ( AB , JD ) Magdalen College, Oxford ( BA )

Era

Contemporary philosophy

Region

Western philosophy

School

Analytic , Legal interpretivism

Institutions

Yale University University of Oxford University College London New York University

Doctoral students

Jeremy Waldron

Main interests

Jurisprudence political philosophy

Notable ideas

Law as integrity fit and justification in law right answer thesis legal interpretivism rights as trumps

via Wikipedia infobox

Wikidata facts

Languages spoken

English language

Image

Ronald Dworkin at the Brooklyn Book Festival.jpg

via Wikidata · CC0