Professor Ronald Dworkin

I was very sad to read about Professor Ronald Dworkin’s passing. He was one of the greatest post-war legal philosophers. I think most law students of the past 25 years, have probably read his most widely-quoted book, Law’s Empire (1986),  where Dworkin developed his theory of “Law as integrity”.
 
I’d enjoyed his last book “Justice for Hedgehogs” (2011), about living our truth, showing how its different facets manifest in society. It encapsulated his gentle argument that our responsibilities and obligations to others, flow first from our personal responsibility to take our own lives seriously. That “We are charged to live well by the bare fact of our existence as self-conscious creatures with lives to lead.” Our obligation to “make our lives good lives: authentic and worthy”, to lead a live of “authenticity”, and “style”, because “life, particularly human life, is itself part of the vastly larger story of the natural evolution of the universe.”.

I bought my usual copy of the Southern Weekend newspaper (南方周末), and was surprised to see a full (!) page obit. on “Remembering (Ronald) Dworkin” (“纪念德沃金”). Interesting that his name in mandarin has been translated to mean something like “Full of moral character” (de2 wo4 jin1)… …

The air quality hit the “Hazardous” rating again this Sunday. But it was worth the trip out, for the sheer joy of reading Dworkin’s jurisprudence in mandarin.  It was also a lovely, albeit bittersweet, reward for my hard work of the past 2 months, working at the language, reading his jurisprudence in mandarin about the “intrinsic value” of human life, “our responsibility to ourselves”, to lead a good and valuable life.

“德沃金留给我们的答案是这样的：每个人如何过他的一生，对我们的政治社群而言，都具有内在而客观的重要性；在这样的政治社群中，每个人都对自己一生应该如何过，承担个人责任。他也强调，人在这样的政治社群生活，才活得有尊重。不论我们是否同意德沃金，要改善我们此地的政治生活，我们没有别人可以依赖，除了设法让自己的思想尽早脱离充满粗糙理解的状态“