德沃金关于正义自由理论： 个人权利和作为共同体意志法律原则.docVIP

Dworkin presented law as integrity as a synthesis of the best elements of conventionalism and pragmatism. Like pragmatism, law as integrity affirmed the responsibility of judges to revise the law in response to the evolving needs of their community. Unlike pragmatism, but in common with conventionalism, law as integrity also affirmed the reality of legal rights. In contrast to conventionalism, though, law as integrity did not identify the legal rights of a given community exclusively with the rights specified in the explicit content of the legal conventions created through the decisions of its authorized law-making institutions. For Dworkin, law as integrity also recognized that the legal rights of a community derived from the principles of political morality which constituted the presupposed justification for its conventional system of law. Law as integrity stood as an essentially non-conventionalist thesis about the grounds of law and legal rights. The theory assumed that the legal rules of a community were valid not only because of their consistency with prior institutional decisions, but also because of their coherent relationship with the principles of justice, fairness, and procedural due process that offered the best constructive interpretation of [that] communitys legal practice.12 Under law as integrity, Dworkin maintained, such principles were recognized to serve as a foundation for the legal rights and obligations enforced by the courts in hard cases. Accordingly, law as integrity did not restrict the moral and political justification for the limitations imposed upon the coercive force of law to the conventionalist requirement of predictability in procedural due process. Instead, law as integrity affirmed that, in a real community, these limitations were themselves underwritten by the more substantive principles of justice and fairness embodied throughout its political structure and legal doctrine. Dworkin went on to claim that law as integrity offer