Blackstone's Tower: The English Law School - College of Social ...

The Quest For a Core
roster of officials and their powers each over part of our lives. Law's
empire is defined by attitude, not by territory or power or process. ...
It is an interpretive, self-reflective attitude addressed to politics in the
broadest sense. It is a protestant attitude that makes each citizen
responsible for imagining what his society's public commitments to
principles are, and what these commitments require in new
One need not accept in detail Dworkin's theories of adjudication,
interpretation or justification to agree that exposition—in the sense
of articulating propositions of law—involves interpretation and that
choice of one interpretation in preference to another depends on
justification. Similarly one need not agree with Dworkin's own
account of law as a form of social practice to accept that "external"
descriptions and explanations of a social practice have to take
account of the internal points of view of participants.
Dworkin's general theory gives the jurist a distinctive role: to
provide the most persuasive interpretation of a given legal system
in terms of its internal coherence and its underlying justificatory
principles of political morality. On this view any external account
of law in terms of other disciplines is dependent on an internal,
rational, argumentative jurisprudence in which systemic integrity,
interpretation, and reasoning as well as rules and principles are
central concepts.
Not surprisingly, Dworkin's theory is controversial. Apart from
some of its details, each of the main elements has been challenged:
a few behaviourists and economic analysts maintain that it is possible
to give descriptions and explanations of legal behaviour of
high predictive value without reference to the internal points of
view of the participants involved 3 '; others have challenged the systemic
nature of our own or other so-called "systems"—the
common law, says Brian Simpson, is more like a muddle than a
system 32 ; critical scholars and others have challenged the claims
to coherence of Western "liberal" systems; and there are various
kinds of sceptics about the alleged rationality of legal argumentation
33 ; what many of the critics have in common is a view that
Dworkin's perspective tends to give an idealised, aspirational
account of law that has the tendency to gloss over the harsh realities
of actual legal systems: it is a noble dream about law that does
not provide an adequate vocabulary for dealing with its seamier
side or with bottom-up perspectives. The Bad Man reasons, but
does he argue? Others have doubted whether Dworkin's perspect-
161