Born in Worcester, Massachusetts, Dworkin was educated at Harvard and Oxford. He was Professor of Jurisprudence at Oxford (1969–98), Professor of Philosophy and Frank Henry Sommer Professor of Law at New York University 1975–2013, and Quain Professor of Jurisprudence at University College, London (1998–2006). He was known for his defence of the integral place that moral and pragmatic considerations play in legal decision-making, in opposition to what he supposed was their exclusion by legal positivism and by the work of his predecessor at Oxford, H. L. A. Hart. Although he described himself as a realist about legal truth, Dworkin’s system may also be described as constructivist, since it approaches the nature of legal truth through the method of an ideal, or perhaps romanticized judge ‘Hercules’. This fictional character is sensitive to both morality and settled law, and above all to the theory that best explains settled law, and it is his procedures that give us our conception of legal method and legal truth. A liberal and a Democrat, Dworkin based constitutional rights on a fundamental right of all people to equal concern and respect; applications of this included defences of reverse discrimination (this may be tough on those who are denied schools or jobs because of such policies, but the ‘right to be treated as an equal’ need not imply a right to equal treatment). On the other hand, Dworkin defended other freedoms, such as the right to produce and consume pornography, against the objection that its existence displays lack of equal concern and respect for women. His many books include Taking Rights Seriously (1977), A Matter of Principle (1985), Law’s Empire (1986), Life’s Dominion: An Argument about Abortion, Euthanasia, and Individual Freedom (1993), and Justice for Hedgehogs (2011). See also law, philosophy of; positivism (legal).