The cause was leukemia, said Richard Revesz, the dean of the New York University School of Law, who announced the death. Professor Dworkin had been a member of the school’s faculty for many years and also taught at University College, London.
Professor Dworkin was “the primary legal philosopher of his generation,” said Judge Guido Calabresi, a former dean of Yale Law School who now sits on the federal appeals court in New York. He was also one of the most closely read as a mainstay of The New York Review of Books, to which he contributed articles for decades.
Professor Dworkin’s central argument started with the premise that the crucial phrases in the Constitution — “the freedom of speech,” “due process of law,” “equal protection of the laws” — were, as he put it, “drafted in exceedingly abstract moral language.”
“These clauses,” he continued, “must be understood in the way their language most naturally suggests: they refer to abstract moral principles and incorporate these by reference, as limits on the government’s power.”
It is not hard to hear echoes of Professor Dworkin’s approach in the writings of Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, who often holds the crucial vote in morally charged debates before the United States Supreme Court and is quite likely to play a decisive role in two pending cases on same-sex marriage.
Professor Dworkin, in a 2005 interview, discussed Justice Kennedy’s majority opinion in Lawrence v. Texas, a 2003 decision that struck down laws making gay sex a crime.
“The dominant voice you hear,” Professor Dworkin said, “is about justice and injustice and what a decent society will tolerate and what it won’t.”
Thomas Nagel, a philosopher and Professor Dworkin’s partner in a colloquium in legal, political and social philosophy offered for many years at New York University, said in a 2007 tribute that his friend’s analytic power was amplified by the vigor and verve of his writing. Professor Dworkin, he said, could “explain difficult moral issues about law, politics and society in lucid terms to a general nonacademic audience — without in any way watering them down or simplifying them.”
His critics said Professor Dworkin’s approach was a smokescreen. “Dworkin writes with great complexity but, in the end, always discovers that the moral philosophy appropriate to the Constitution produces the results that a liberal moral relativist prefers,” Robert H. Bork, the former Supreme Court nominee who died in December, wrote in 1997 in “The Tempting of America.”
Judge Richard A. Posner, who sits on the federal appeals court in Chicago, wrote in a 2001 study of public intellectuals that Professor Dworkin’s popular writings were slippery, partisan and predictable. “Dworkin’s dominant bent as a public intellectual,” Judge Posner wrote, “is to polemicize in favor of a standard menu of left-liberal policies.”
Ronald Myles Dworkin was born in Providence, R.I., on Dec. 11, 1931. His parents divorced when he was young, and he said his memories of his father were hazy, though he believed his father had emigrated from Lithuania as a child. His mother, Madeline, raised three children on her own by teaching piano. He went to Harvard on a scholarship reserved for graduates of Providence’s public schools. “There were rarely any takers,” Professor Dworkin recalled.
After graduating from Harvard, he attended Oxford as a Rhodes scholar and obtained law degrees from both places. He spent much of his life with one foot in the United States and the other in Britain, spending part of the year in each place.
Professor Dworkin was dashing, witty, well connected and open to earthly delight. “Dworkin is probably the least ascetic person I know, and one of the most worldly,” Professor Nagel said in 2005.
After graduating from Harvard Law School, Mr. Dworkin served as a law clerk to Judge Learned Hand, a federal appeals court judge in New York and a towering figure in the law. In a letter to Justice Felix Frankfurter of the United States Supreme Court, Judge Hand called the young man “the law clerk to beat all law clerks,” a compliment he undermined only slightly by calling him “Roland Dworkin.”
Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/15/us/ronald-dworkin-legal-philosopher-dies-at-81.html?partner=rss&emc=rss