Empire-Building

Extract

Law's Empire is a bold and ambitious attempt to provide a philosophical framework which will serve to install the judicial perspective as the preferred perspective from which to think about theories of law. The heart of its argument is that judicial determination of what constitutes law is an exercise in constructive interpretation. Judges have the responsibility to seek that story of the law that both fits reasonably with its past political history and constitutes the best justification that can be given of the legal practices of the society as a whole. They are engaged in finding an account consistent with the history of the practice that displays the point, purpose(s) and values that the law serves to express and uphold, and so brings out most fully the law's claim to authority as a legitimate expression of governmental power in that society. Dworkin believes that the interpretation of law that best satisfies these conditions is law as integrity, which conceives of law as expressing a coherent set of principles embodying those substantive ideas of justice, fairness and procedural fairness that are respected in the community. Integrity tells judges to identify legal rights and duties as though they were all created by a single author, the community personified, as an embodiment of a coherent conception of justice and fairness to which the community subscribes. In this way, integrity requires judges to interpret the rules of law as having a principled justification in a network of values and moral principles that the society adopts.