Justice in Robes

which Ronald Dworkin published three decades ago. Though that earlier volume bore a catchier title, Justice in Robes is otherwise similar in being a collection of very loosely related essays on sundry topics in legal, political, and moral philosophy. Both books display Dworkin’s truculent hostility toward legal positivism and his more polite opposition to value-pluralism (namely, the notion that basic moral values are largely independent of one another and are therefore sometimes in conflict with one another). Each of the two volumes, moreover, is at once exhilarating and exasperating. In each of them, the brilliance of Dworkin is evident; but so is his resolute blindness to the merits of some of the doctrines which he assails. Dworkin surpasses his younger contemporaries John Finnis and Joseph Raz as the most prominent legal philosopher in his generation—a remarkable generation that encompasses a number of top-notch philosophical thinkers who studied at Oxford under H.L.A. Hart. Dworkin’s philosophical dexterity is plain in several of the chapters in the present book, especially in those relating to constitutional theory and adjudication. His ripostes to theorists of American constitutional law such as Antonin Scalia and Cass Sunstein and Laurence Tribe are telling, as are quite a few of his somewhat repetitive rejoinders to Richard Posner. Even more impressive is his antiArchimedeanism in the context of political and moral philosophy; that is, Dworkin cogently maintains that the ontological status of moral facts and the epistemological status of moral knowledge and the semantic status of moral truths are all moral matters through and through, albeit on high levels of abstraction. (For some reason, his most important and percipient essay on that topic—‘‘Objectivity and Truth: You’d Better Believe It,’’ 25 Philosophy & Public Affairs 87 [1996]—is not included in this volume. Presumably, he will be incorporating it into a subsequent book.) Not nearly as penetrating, however, are Dworkin’s pugnacious confrontations with legal positivism and his less shrill but equally misdirected critique of Isaiah Berlin’s value-pluralism. The latter critique is confined to the fourth chapter,