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I would like to thank Michael Giudice, without whom this paper would not have been possible. His comments and criticisms were always abundant and well measured. I am also indebted to William Sweet for being formative to my understanding of many of the issues discussed here.
During his career, Ronald Dworkin wrote extensively on an impressive range of issues in moral, political, and legal philosophy, but, like many of his contemporaries, international law remained a topic of relative neglect.1His most sustained work on international law is a posthumously published article, "A New Philosophy for International Law", which displays some familiar aspects of his views in general jurisprudence, in addition to some novel (though perhaps surprising) arguments as well. Although I explore both the similarities and differences between Dworkin's earlier work and this posthumous publication, my primary objective is to highlight the novel aspect of this latest work. This paper will set up a comparison between a view about international law that we might have expected Dworkin to offer, given his firmly established views about state law, and the view he actually adopts in the aforementioned article. I believe there is much to learn from such a comparison, not just about Dworkin's general jurisprudence, but about the nature of international law as well.
Let us begin with the hypothetical. Had the posthumous article never been published what might we have expected Dworkin to say about the normative, or obligatory, force of international law? Of course, it is beyond the scope of this paper to list all of the possibilities but I think there is one central thesis in Dworkin's work that would ground any further argument we would expect him to make: namely, Dworkin's view of law as inextricably related to morality, and in particular his view of law as integrity. In what follows I first examine the variations of this thesis found throughout his previous works. Then, I show how this thesis functions as the foundation for a number of Dworkin's positions: including, but not limited to, his theory of rights and his conception of human dignity. Although it is not the purpose of this paper to work out, at least not...