Volume 24, Number 9 · May 26, 1977
He'd Rather Have Rights
By Marshall Cohen
Taking Rights Seriously
by Ronald Dworkin
Harvard University Press, 293 pp., $12.00
Ronald Dworkin's Taking Rights Seriously is the most important work in jurisprudence since H.L.A. Hart's The Concept of Law and, from a philosophical point of view at least, the most sophisticated contribution to that subject yet made by an American writer. In this collection of essays, Dworkin argues that any adequate political theory must take rights seriously in a way that prevailing conceptions fail to do. He therefore rejects both legal positivism and utilitarianism. Legal positivism, the theory of law that derives from John Austin and Jeremy Bentham, has been directly or indirectly influential on such prominent American jurists as Oliver Wendell Holmes, Felix Frankfurter, and Learned Hand. Dworkin rejects it because it denies that individuals possess any legal rights that have not been created by explicit political decisions or social practices. In fact, Dworkin argues, we possess many legal rights that were not created in either of these ways.
Review, 3746 words
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