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Ronald Dworkin Quotes

Moral principle is the foundation of law.

Moral principle is the foundation of law.

Ronald Dworkin
Law, Foundation, Principles

Integrity is the key to understanding legal practice. Law's empire is defined by attitude, not territory or power or process.

Ronald Dworkin
Attitude, Integrity, Keys

Without dignity our lives are only blinks of duration. But if we manage to lead a good life well, we create something more. We write a subscript to our mortality. We make our lives tiny diamonds in the cosmic sands.

Ronald Dworkin
Life, Writing, Creating
Ronald Dworkin (2011). “Justice for Hedgehogs”, p.437, Harvard University Press

Discretion, like the hole in a doughnut, does not exist except as an area left open by a surrounding belt of restriction. It is therefore a relative concept. It always makes sense to ask, "Discretion under which standards?" or "Discretion as to which authority?

Ronald Dworkin
Doe, Authority, Holes
Ronald Dworkin (2013). “Taking Rights Seriously”, p.48, A&C Black

Balanced' is a code for 'denied': a right to free speech that must be 'balanced' against so exhaustive a list of other supposed values means a right that can be exercised only when those in power judge that the speech in question is innocuous to them.

Ronald Dworkin
Freedom, Mean, Power

We write a subscript to our mortality. We make our lives tiny diamonds in the cosmic sands.

Ronald Dworkin
Writing, Tiny, Sand
Ronald Dworkin (2011). “Justice for Hedgehogs”, p.437, Harvard University Press

What is shocking and wrong is not [Lord Devlin's] idea that the community's morality counts, but his idea of what counts as the community's morality.

Ronald Dworkin
Ideas, Community, Morality
Ronald Dworkin (2013). “Taking Rights Seriously”, p.305, A&C Black

Perhaps MacKinnon should reflect on these suggestions that the censorship issue is not so simple-minded, so transparently gender-against-gender, as she insists. She should stop calling names long enough to ask whether personal sensationalism, hyperbole, and bad arguments are really what the cause of sexual equality now needs.

Ronald Dworkin
Simple, Names, Issues
"Pornography: An Exchange". Ronald Dworkin's reply to "Women and Pornography" by Catherine A. MacKinnon, New York Review of Books, Volume 41, No. 5, www.nybooks.com. March 3, 1994.

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