Cosa resta dell’impero? Fare i conti con Ronald Dworkin, oggi

This essay aims to reconstruct Ronald Dworkin’s legal philosophy more than ten years after his death. The first part examines in depth his criticisms of legal positivism. Alt-hough these criticisms are at times exaggerated, they nevertheless clearly identify the underlying causes of the crisis in legal positivism. The second part offers a critical analy-sis of Dworkin’s conception of law, which he himself presented as an alternative to legal positivism and natural law theory. Many aspects of Dworkin’s thought remain outside the scope of this study. These include: his studies on equality; his bioethical reflections on the beginning and end of life; his theory of democracy; his critique of originalism; and his defence of a ‘moral reading’ of the constitution. These are pieces of a unified whole, the framework of which I have sought to reconstruct.