The Mandate of Dignity: Ronald Dworkin, Revolutionary Constitutionalism, and the Claims of Justice

.A major American legal thinker, the late Ronald Dworkin also helped shape new dispensations in the Global South. In South Africa, in particular, his work has been fiercely debated in the context of one of the world’s most progressive constitutions. Despite Dworkin’s discomfort with that document’s enshrinement of “socioeconomic rights,” his work enables an important defense of a jurisprudence premised on justice, rather than on legitimacy. Beginning with a critical overview of Dworkin’s work culminating in his two principles of dignity, Cornell and Friedman turn to Kant and Hegel for an approach better able to ground the principles of dignity Dworkin advocates. Framed thus, Dworkin’s challenge to legal positivism enables a theory of constitutional revolution in which existing legal structures are transformatively revalued according to ethical mandates. By founding law on dignity, Dworkin begins to articulate an ethical jurisprudence responsive to the lived experience of injustice. This book, then, articulates a revolutionary constitutionalism crucial to the struggle for decolonization.The Mandate of Dignity: Ronald Dworkin, Revolutionary Constitutionalism, and the Claims of Justice is written by Drucilla Cornell; Nick Friedman and published by Fordham University Press. ISBNs for The Mandate of Dignity are 9780823268139, 0823268136 and the print ISBNs are 9780823268108, 0823268101. Additional ISBNs include 9780823268115.