Ronald Dworkin papers

Ronald Dworkin was a legal philosopher, law professor, and writer. He wrote widely in both the academic and popular press and was a faculty member at Yale University, Oxford University, New York University, and University College London. Dworkin was born on December 11, 1931 in Providence, Rhode Island. He earned a BA from Harvard University in 1953; a BA from Oxford University, where he was a Rhodes Scholar, in 1955; and an LLB from Harvard Law School in 1957.

After graduating, Dworkin clerked with Judge Learned Hand on the United States Second Circuit Court of Appeals. He then practiced law with the Sullivan & Cromwell firm in New York City. In 1962, he accepted a position as professor of law at Yale Law School, where he was later appointed to the Wesley N. Hohfeld Chair of Jurisprudence. From 1966 to 1969 he served as master of Trumbull College at Yale. In 1969, Dworkin left Yale to take a position at Oxford University, replacing H. L. A. Hart as chair of jurisprudence. Beginning in 1975, he held concurrent faculty positions at New York University and Oxford. At NYU, he founded and ran, with Thomas Nagel, the annual Colloquium in Legal, Political, and Social Philosophy. In 1997, Dworkin retired from Oxford and accepted a position as Professor of Jurisprudence at University College London.

Dworkin wrote and published extensively in both academic legal journals and the popular press. He published several books, including Taking Rights Seriously, Law’s Empire, Sovereign Virtue, and Justice for Hedgehogs. In addition, he wrote frequently for a general audience in publications including the Observer (UK), the New York Times, and most frequently in the New York Review of Books, where he was a regular contributor from the late 1960s through 2013.

Dworkin married Betsy Ross in 1958; they had two children, Jennifer and Anthony. Betsy died in 2000, and Dworkin later married Irene Brendel. Dworkin died on February 14, 2013.