Interpretation, Injustice, and Integrity

Common law adjudication exemplifies a conception of law that gives pride of place to legal principle. Dworkin's account, however, occupies an unstable position between competing legal philosophies, undermining his defence of 'integrity'. When the internal, interpretative viewpoint is consistently maintained, the criteria for identifying the law's requirements give assurance of their moral bindingness: legal practice seeks convergence on a sufficient approximation to justice to ensure legitimacy. The critical features of legal practice are those that the correct interpretation, sensitive to moral judgment, identifies: they have no independent status grounded on social facts alone. Personal integrity and legal integrity are therefore closely aligned: the former requires adherence to law, correctly interpreted, or else repudiation of the demands of an illegitimate regime. There is no third position allowing loyalty to a just legal order to be overridden in particular instances. The appropriate balance of political values is itself the product of legal reasoning, internal to interpretative truth.