Dworkin’s approach to legal interpretation

Does interpreting a law mean finding out what people agree it means, or deciding what you personally think is right? Dworkin thinks judges are being pushed into a bad choice. They reject the second approach and assume that leaves only the first. He wants another option.

The opening sentence gives us two theories before explaining either one. Slow down enough to separate the names from the ideas. Natural law, as described here, lets judges consult their own moral convictions even when doing so means disregarding the law’s wording and legal precedents. Dworkin rejects that freedom. Judges would effectively be making laws, taking power that belongs to legislators. We do not need to know the word “arrogates” in advance: the surrounding sentence tells us that judges would be claiming someone else’s authority.

The second paragraph explains legal positivism. Here, legal meaning comes from social convention, much as a word’s meaning comes from how people use it. If we disagree about what a word means, we investigate its accepted use. We do not settle that disagreement by announcing what we wish the word meant.

Apply that comparison to law. The judge’s job, in this account of positivism, is to identify the accepted interpretation. Jurists can legitimately disagree about what the underlying convention is, but consensus is what resolves the issue. If there is no consensus, there is no legal fact for the judge to discover.

That is a claim about legal meaning, not a claim that whatever is popular must be morally good. The paragraph explicitly separates law from morality. Keep that distinction in place, or the discussion will turn into a different debate about whether majority opinion is always right.

Now Dworkin pushes back: judges and lawyers do not actually stop reasoning when consensus runs out. They still act as though one interpretation could be correct. Can we justify that practice without giving judges permission to impose any moral opinion they happen to hold? We should expect a middle position that allows more reasoning than consensus alone while still setting limits on judges.

The limit is the law’s own logic and general principles. A proposed interpretation has to fit those principles. Because they can include justice and fairness, applying them may require moral judgment. But the judge must connect that judgment to the legal framework. A personal feeling that a result is good is not enough. Think of the difference between asking what fairness requires within an existing rule and simply replacing the rule with whatever you prefer.

The final paragraph explains why this matters. If legal meaning is more than what other people currently think, a judge might improve on a widely accepted interpretation. The judge might even improve on what the law’s original authors thought it meant. The underlying principles constrain the interpretation; the original authors’ views are not an automatic stopping point.

Dworkin’s approach is therefore more specific than a compromise between two extremes. It supplies a standard: consistency with the law’s underlying reasoning. Nor is the author merely reporting this idea neutrally. The third paragraph says Dworkin correctly identifies natural law’s error, and the final paragraph adopts his criticism of positivism. The overall direction is approval of this constrained but substantive role for legal interpretation.