Freedom's law: The moral reading of the American constitution.

Ronald Dworkin's Freedom's Law proposes a novel and controversial method of interpreting the Constitution called "the moral reading." According to the moral reading, judges decide constitutional cases arising under the abstract provisions of the Constitution and Bill of Rights by deciding the appropriate scope of the moral principles of liberty and equality that those provisions embody and by making "fresh moral judgments" in order to apply those principles in concrete cases. In Freedom's Law, Professor Dworkin alo attempts to defend the moral reading against the frequent charge that it is undemocratic because it delegates too much control over social and moral policy to an unelected and politically unaccountable elite corps of federal judges. In this book review, Ara Lovitt argues that Dworkin's defense of the moral reading will be unpersuasive to those readers whose views of constitutional interpretation are informed by the justifications for judicial review in a democratic society.