The Mandate of Dignity: Ronald Dworkin, Revolutionary Constitutionalism, and the Claims of Justice(Just Ideas)

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.

About the Author :
Drucilla Cornell was Professor Emerita of Political Science, Comparative Literature, and Women's and Gender Studies at Rutgers University; Professor Extraordinaire at the University of Pretoria, South Africa; and a visiting professor at Birkbeck College, University of London. With a background in philosophy, law, and grassroots mobilization, she played a central role in the organization of the memorable conferences on deconstruction and justice at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law in 1989, 1990, and 1993. She was the author of The Philosophy of the Limit (1992), Feminism and Pornography (2000), and Law and Revolution in South Africa: uBuntu, Dignity, and the Struggle for Constitutional Transformation (2014). She has also coedited several books: Feminism as Critique: On the Politics of Gender (1987), with Seyla Benhabib; and Hegel and Legal Theory (1991) and Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice (1992), with David Gray Carlson and Michel Rosenfeld. She was part of a philosophical exchange with Seyla Benhabib, Judith Butler, and Nancy Fraser entitled Feminist Contentions (1995). In addition to her academic work, she wrote four produced plays.

Review :
"The Mandate of Dignity is an ambitious undertaking that contributes importantly to ongoing debates within jurisprudence and political philosophy as well as more specific controversies regarding constitutional law and transitional justice in South Africa."----Morris Kaplan "Purchase College, SUNY" This pathbreaking work puts the revolutionary achievement of the South African Constitution and the interpretive work of the South African constitutional court in the illuminating perspective of the best theory of constitutional interpretation now available, the neo-Kantian theory of equal dignity of Ronald Dworkin. It shows clearly how the work of our best constitutional courts--the South African court among them--is now a common humane enterprise for the protection of universal human rights under the rule of law throughout the world.----David A.J. Richards "New York University School of Law"