Volume 53, Number 13 · August 10, 2006
How Judges Should Judge
By Jeremy Waldron
Justice in Robes
by Ronald Dworkin
Belknap Press/Harvard University Press, 308 pp., $35.00
Everyone believes in the rule of law. But how do we tell what the law is, especially for new and difficult cases? Can judges and lawyers just look it up—read it out of a book? Many people—politicians especially, when they are debating the confirmation of federal judges—say the answer is yes. Not Ronald Dworkin. Since the early 1970s, Dworkin has been the most distinguished exponent of the view that lawyers and judges cannot say what the law is, on any issue, without engaging their own values and principles, their own conceptions of right and wrong, their own best estimates of what makes a society a good society and what makes it just or unjust.
Review, 4451 words
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