University of Illinois Law Review

In this review essay, Professor Michael Steven Green argues that Dworkin’s reputation among his fellow philosophers has needlessly suf-fered because of his refusal to back down from his “semantic sting” ar-gument against H. L. A. Hart. Philosophers of law have uniformly rejected the semantic sting argument as a fallacy. Nevertheless Dworkin reaffirms the argument in Justice in Robes, his most recent collection of essays, and devotes much of the book to stubbornly, and unsuccessfully, defending it. This is a pity, because the failure of the semantic sting ar-gument in no way undermines Dworkin’s other arguments against Hart.

Justice in Robes, by Ronald Dworkin. Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2006.