I don't know whether Ronald Dworkin is a violent man, but Brian Leiter probably does not want to meet Dworkin in a dark alley. Leiter's paper The End of Empire: Dworkin and Jurisprudence in the 21st Century is as complete a fisking of another scholar as I have ever read. And Brian uses only 21 pages to do the job.

Here is a nice summary of the argument, though you really need to read the whole paper:

The New York University School of Law web page describes Ronald Dworkin as "probably the most influential figure in contemporary Anglo-American legal theory” and says “Dworkin is probably one of the two or three contemporary authors whom legal scholars will be reading 200 years from now.” Both statements are, I shall suggest, rather hyperbolic, at least with respect to Dworkin the legal philosopher.... Notwithstanding the majestic sweep and ambition of his jurisprudential corpus, my conclusion—which I’ve come to only gradually over the last decade of reading, writing, talking and teaching about problems in legal philosophy—is that in legal philosophy, Dworkin now deserves to go the way of Skinner in psychology or Derrida in literary theory, that is, the way of figures whose work, at one time, was a stimulus to new research, but who, in the end, led—or, in Dworkin’s case, tried to lead—their field down a deeply wrong-headed path. The only good news in the story about Dworkin’s impact on law and philosophy is that most of the field declined to follow the Dworkinian path—something, interestingly, that those not working in legal philosophy generally do not know.

Those of you who read Brian's blog know that he is capable of more impassioned language than that, and he does not disappoint in this paper. For example, he argues that Dworkin's recent rhetoric "borders ... on the 'unhinged,'" suggests that a recent Dworkin law review article is a "hatchet job," and summarizes Dworkin's positive legacy thus: "seven distinctive Dworkinian theses, none very plausible, many spectacularly wrong-headed, all extensively criticized, and some abandoned already by Dworkin himself."

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