Expanding Law‘s Empire: Interpretivism, Morality and the Value of Legality

Abstract

For interpretivist theories of law it is the value of legality that informs what counts as true legal propositions. The leading theory of legality in the interpretivist school is Ronald Dworkin’s ‘Law as Integrity’. This paper suggests that Dworkin’s view fails to account for several features of modern legal practices, particularly those that deal with international and comparative legal standards. It also highlights some inconsistencies in law as integrity as a conception of the value of legality and suggests an alternative conception to correct for them. The result of this conception of legality provides the major thesis of this paper. This is that under an interpretivist theory, true propositions of law never conflict with what morality demands.