ABSTRACT
This chapter begins by focusing on the most extended example in Ronald Dworkin's essay of a "chain enterprise", the imagined literary example of a novel written not by a single author but by a group of coauthors. In his essay Law as Interpretation, Dworkin is concerned to characterize legal practice in such a way as to avoid claiming either that in deciding a case judges find the plain meaning of the law "just 'there' " or, alternatively, that they make up the meaning "wholesale". Dworkin spends a great deal of time refuting the view that interpretation in law and in literature must concern itself with the intentions of the author. In Dworkin's analysis reading is simply the construing of sense and neither depends nor should depend on the identification of intention. He cites as evidence the fact that authors themselves have been known to reinterpret their own works.
