Law's Empire

Ronald Dworkin

    Rich and multi-layered...The first sustained, full-length treatment of [Dworkin's] general theory of law...It is an ambitious book, and it does not disappoint the expectations appropriate to a major work by an important thinker. Dworkin has developed a complex and powerful system of ideas, and they are expounded here with the clarity and elegance to which his readers are by now accustomed.
       --Thomas Nagel, London Review of Books

    Refreshing and rewarding...Law's Empire is Dworkin's framework for the analysis of critical issues in law; and such are the elegance and power of the book that one who has read it may find it hard to return patiently to the stale and shallow categories...in which so much argument about the role of judges is nowadays conducted.
       --Edwin M. Yoder, Jr., Washington Post Book World

    Ronald Dworkin is America's leading legal philosopher...[Law's Empire bears] testimony to his eminence, evidencing his analytical ingenuity, powerful imagination, and elegant conceptualization. No subject ever seems quite the same after one has read Dworkin's treatment of it.
       --Journal of Philosophy

    Law's Empire is a challenging, important, and richly textured work of legal philosophy written in the vivid and commanding style that Dworkin's readers have come to expect...[It offers] both a conception of law that explains what our law is and an underlying political theory that explains why we should conceive of our law in that way...Dworkin seeks, ultimately, nothing less than a kind of unified field theory of moral justification: a theory that would unite--or at least connect--personal morality, legal justification, and political legitimacy.
       --Silas Wasserstrom, Georgetown Law Journal

  • Cover: Law's Empire
  • A photo of the author

Ronald Dworkin is Sommer Professor of Law and Philosophy at New York University and Jeremy Bentham Professor of Jurisprudence at University College London. He is the 2007 recipient of the Holberg International Memorial Prize.