Freedom's Law: The Moral Reading of the American Constitution - Couverture souple

Dworkin, Ronald

Couverture souple

ISBN 10 : 0674319281 ISBN 13 : 9780674319288

Editeur : Harvard University Press, 1997

Synopsis

Ronald Dworkin argues that Americans have been systematically misled about what their Constitution is, and how judges decide what it means. The Constitution, he observes, grants individual rights in extremely abstract terms. The First Amendment prohibits the passing of laws that "abridge the freedom of speech"; the Fifth Amendment insists on "due process of law"; and the Fourteenth Amendment demands "equal protection of the laws" for all persons. What does that abstract language mean when it is applied to the political controversies that divide Americans--about affirmative action and racial justice, abortion, euthanasia, capital punishment, censorship, pornography, and homosexuality, for example? Judges, and ultimately the justices of the Supreme Court, must decide for everyone, and that gives them great power. How should they decide? Dworkin defends a particular answer to that question, which he calls the "moral reading" of the Constitution. He argues that the Bill of Rights must be understood as setting out general moral principles about liberty and equality and dignity, and that private citizens, lawyers, and finally judges must interpret and apply those general principles by posing and trying to answer more concrete moral questions. Is freedom to choose abortion really a basic moral right and would curtailing that right be a deep injustice, for example? Why? In the detailed discussions of individual constitutional issues that form the bulk of the book, Dworkin shows that our judges do decide hard constitutional cases by posing and answering such concrete moral questions. Indeed he shows that that is the only way they "can" decide those cases. But most judges--and most politicians and most law professors--pretend otherwise. They say that judges must never treat constitutional issues as moral issues because that would be "undemocratic"--it would mean that judges were substituting their own moral convictions for those of Congressmen and state legislators who had be

A propos du livre

Revue de presse :

'The essays cover the (mostly American) major legal excitements of the past ten years...They are invariably lucid and elegant.' (Times Higher Education Supplement)

'High quality argument about matters of the first importance to civilised life: this is exactly what the essays in his lucid, sane, liberal-minded book offer...The case is unanswerable, and Dworkin does a great service in restating it so forcibly. ' (Financial Times)

Biographie de l'auteur :

Ronald Dworkin is Sommer Professor of Law and Philosophy at New York University. He is the 2007 recipient of the Holberg International Memorial Prize.

À propos de cette édition

• Éditeur: Harvard University Press
• Date d'édition: 1997
• ISBN 10: 0674319281
• ISBN 13: 9780674319288
• Reliure: Broché
• Nombre de pages: 416