Taking Rights Seriously

A collection of revised essays in legal and political philosophy. Its opening chapters attack legal positivism as defended by H. L. A. Hart. In 'The Model of Rules', Dworkin argues that law contains not only rules, which apply in an all-or-nothing way, but principles, which have weight; he uses the case of Riggs v. Palmer, in which a court refused to let a murderer inherit from his victim. In 'Hard Cases' he introduces Hercules, an ideal judge who finds the best interpretation of the law's principles, and argues that even in hard cases one side usually has a right to win, so judges do not simply legislate. Later essays argue that individual rights act as trumps over collective goals and utilitarian calculation, that the basic right is to equal concern and respect, and apply these ideas to constitutional interpretation, civil disobedience, reverse discrimination, Rawls's original position and the Hart–Devlin debate on enforcing morality. Positivists reply that principles can fit within a positivist account of law.

It is the starting point for the modern debate between legal positivism and interpretive theories of law, and its idea of rights as trumps still shapes constitutional argument.