Ronald Dworkin, born in Worcester, Massachusetts, has been a leading participant in debates central to legal and political philosophy in the wake of the 1960s. After graduating from Harvard Law School and clerking for legendary federal judge Learned Hand, he held a number of distinguished faculty appointments in the United States and England, including Professor of Jurisprudence at the University of Oxford.

During the early portion of Dworkin's career, social movements such as those connected with civil rights, women's equality, the environment, and the Vietnam War, confronted philosophers with the task of reassessing liberalism. Influential radicals, including Herbert Marcuse, held liberalism responsible for the injustices of the era. However, other philosophers sought to reformulate and defend liberal ideas. John Rawls was the leading figure in the reformulation of liberalism, but next to Rawls, no thinker writing in English has played a larger role than...