ABSTRACT
Dworkin (b 1931), who has occupied the chairs of jurisprudence at Yale, New York, and Oxford, typifies a strand of American legal thought which favours a radical approach to an examination of law and its place in society. In his texts, Taking Rights Seriously (1978) and Law’s Empire (1986), he rejects both natural law and the type of legal positivism associated, in particular, with Hart. He argues that one cannot reduce the concept of a legal system solely to patterns of rules.
