Dworkin's conception of law as chain novel construction

Dworkin on Legal Construction

The Law-as-Integrity Approach to Jurisprudence

Ronald Dworkin presents a view of legal constructivism predicated on the notion of congruence between laws and moral justice to which he refers as law as integrity. In the legal context, integrity means that laws are more appropriately driven by objective principle and not by policy implications; stated another way, the law must be true to principle rather than fit to factual circumstances and desired outcomes in specific cases.

Dworkin also argues that judges must not interject their own opinions and beliefs into the law or into decisions requiring the correct interpretation and application of existing laws to factual situations before courts of justice. According to Dworkin, it is never the case that "reasonable minds may differ" about the correct interpretation of law or of the implications of correctly applying formal laws to cases before them. Rather, Dworkin maintains that the law always provides the means to identify the correct answer; the principal role of the judge is therefore to accurately interpret and then correctly apply the law to factual situations in legal disputes. In that regard, Dworkin very specifically rejects the proposition that there are any "gaps" in the law.

Dworkin employs several conceptual arguments to support his approach to legal construction and jurisprudence. He explains the evolution of law through the continual contributions of judges over time with an analogy about writing novels; he illustrates what is meant by the notion of objective analysis through a hypothetical "perfect" judge; and he uses an old English case to argue for balancing the moral equities in laws whose purpose it is to benefit society.

The Chain Novel and Objective Rightness of Legal Decisions and Applications

To provide an analogy for understanding the way that the law evolves over the course of jurisprudential history, Dworkin describes the process of writing a "chain novel" whereby different authors collaborate to write successive chapters of a novel one at a time. The second author is constrained in that the second chapter may build upon and develop ideas from the first chapter, but it must not conflict outright or be logically or historically inconsistent or irreconcilable with anything in the first chapter. Each successive author is more constrained by the details added in the series of prior chapter. The law develops the same way through the continual addition of new "chapters" by judges who are necessarily constrained by the decisions, definitions, and determinations of all of the judges whose case decisions precede their "new chapters."

One of the concepts that Dworkin sets out to explain is the notion of objective truth or objective rightness and wrongness. Dworkin maintains that the role of judges is not to make law by imposing their independent values in interpreting and applying the law. Their proper role in that capacity is to understand what the law means, to determine the most nearly-perfect application of legal principles with integrity in relation to the values and maximum possible benefit to society, and in a manner that incorporates previous legal decisions appropriately through the principle of stare decisis.

To illustrate, Dworkin introduces a hypothetical judge "Hercules" with the monumental task of determining the truth and the correct decision. In principle, Dworkin argues that the truth is always knowable for any given factual circumstances; the difficulty is that the human intellect is imperfect. In the same way, there is a finite number of individual particles of sand on the earth at any moment in time. Human intellect and capabilities are incapable of determining that precise number; it would require a hypothetically limitless intellectual capacity. Judge Hercules possesses that infinite intelligence and also has the luxury of infinite time for contemplation. Dworkin suggests that Judge Hercules would always make the right decision and that the role of human judges is simply to aspire to be as Hercules-like as possible. Dworkin's Judge Hercules is very similar to John Rawls' allegory about the veil of ignorance that he uses to illustrate the meaning of objective justice.

Principle vs. Policy

To explain the importance of valuing principle over policy in the construct and just application of laws, Dworkin recalls an English case: McLoughlin v. O' Brian involving the emotional harm experienced by plaintiff in connection with her emotional breakdown caused by seeing the injuries to her husband and sons (at the hospital after the fact) and to being told of the loss of her daughter in a vehicular accident in which the plaintiff was at fault. Dworkin rejects the rationale of that court in allowing the plaintiff to recover despite the fact that the applicable law required as a condition for recovery for emotional distress that a plaintiff personally witness or immediately come upon the accident where a loved one is seriously injured or killed. In Dworkin's view the same decision could possibly have been reached appropriately on principle, but not on the basis of policy implications in the manner that it was decided by the court.