Why Does Dworkin Interest Philosophers?

Benoit Frydman examines why Ronald Dworkin's jurisprudential work attracts such significant and widespread attention among philosophers despite addressing questions in legal theory that initially appear distant from traditional philosophical preoccupations. He argues that Dworkin's theory constitutes fundamentally a sophisticated theory of interpretation that reveals how judicial reasoning, situated concretely at the level of the courtroom and individual cases, engages the central philosophical problem concerning the relationship between reason and tradition—a problem that animated major twentieth-century philosophical debates between thinkers like Gadamer and Habermas. Dworkin successfully navigates between the Scylla of mechanical jurisprudence (which denies meaningful judicial discretion), the Charybdis of legal realism (which reduces judging to arbitrary preference), and the utilitarian pragmatism of law and economics, thereby vindicating the possibility of rational justification in judicial decision-making, particularly regarding constitutional interpretation, and thus rendering his theoretical contribution highly relevant to contemporary philosophy's broader preoccupations with interpretation and practical reason.