Law as Integrity

Integrity, for Ronald Dworkin, is the demand that a political community act on a single coherent set of principles across all its legal decisions—that it speak with one voice, treating like cases alike not by mechanical rule but by fidelity to the principles that justify the practice as a whole. A judge deciding under integrity does not ask “what was usually decided?” or “what does the statistical pattern predict?” She constructs the interpretation that simultaneously fits the past decisions well enough to count as the same community's law and shows that law in its best moral light. This is a two-dimensional act. Fit is necessary but never sufficient: among the interpretations that fit the past adequately, the judge must choose the one that is morally best—that reflects the most defensible principles the practice can be made to embody. This second dimension, justification, is irreducibly normative. It is a judgment about which