Dworkin's Law as Integrity

Ronald Dworkin (1931–2013), Hart's student and eventual successor to Hart's chair at Oxford, mounted the most sustained challenge to legal positivism from within the analytic tradition, beginning with essays collected in Taking Rights Seriously (1977). Dworkin's opening move, in the essay "The Model of Rules I," is that Hart's picture of law as a system of social-fact-validated rules cannot account for the role that principles — standards such as "no one should profit from their own wrong," invoked by the New York Court of Appeals in the 1889 case Riggs v. Palmer to deny a murderer his inheritance under an otherwise valid will — actually play in adjudication, especially in hard cases where no clear rule dictates an outcome. Principles, unlike rules, do not apply in all-or-nothing fashion but instead have a dimension of "weight," to be balanced against competing principles case by case, and because they are not traceable to any social-fact rule of recognition (no legislature enacted "no one should profit from their own wrong" as statute), their status as binding law is, for Dworkin, fatal to Hart's positivist picture of a rule of recognition exhausting the criteria of legal validity.