I posted recently on Scott Soames’s marvelously compact essay on "Analytic Philosophy in America." My post quoted from his description of the revival of normative ethics, but I had nothing to say about Soames’s quite peculiar description of analytic philosophy of law in the United States. Brian Leiter has some very astute and acute comments in his post Soames on "Analytic Philosophy," and the Special Case of Philosophy of Law. Here is a snippet (and what follows is described by Leiter as a "minor point"):
[Soames] compares the "revival" in political philosophy effectuated by Rawls and Nozick to the "revival" in philosophy of law effectuated by Dworkin. But surely it was Hart who brought about the integration of jurisprudence into English-speaking philosophy generally, and rejuvenated philosophical interest in law; Dworkin, Feinberg, Raz, Finnis and others simply continued that development. (One can acknowledge this point without agreeing with my stronger claim that the Dworkinian program is now discredited and defunct.) Indeed, among philosophers who think about law, Raz’s influence is far greater than Dworkin’s.
(And by the way, Leiter has more to say about the accuracy of Soames’s remarks in the very interesting & spot-on comments that he describes as "major".) Brian is surely right about his characterization , although Soames might reply that his essay was about analytic philosophy of law in the United States and that (for better or for worse) Dworkin’s program was (or "is") the most influential American program–if one excludes "contemporary" work, by which I mean work done in the last twenty years or so.
But I should like to suggest that all of this misses something important about Dworkin and his influence on legal theory. The philosophy of law is sometimes conceived very narrowly–with a focus on the "what is law" question. Conceived in this way, Hart is the giant of the analytic tradition and Raz is the most influential contemporary figure. This may come as a surprise to nonspecialists, who might get the impression that Dworkin’s role in the "what is law" debate is central and that Raz is a less significant figure. That’s surely wrong, even if one rejects Leiter’s "Death of Dworkin" thesis.
However, in my opinion, the whole focus (implicit in Soame’s essay) on "what as law" as the primary contribution of so-called "analytic philosophy of law" to legal theory is wrongheaded. In the long run, the "what is law debate" is mostly of interest to a small (but important) group of specialists. The most important contribution that philosophy makes to legal theory is to normative legal theory. If I might be permitted the luxury of a very sweeping generlization, the question "what are the criteria for the normative evaluation of law" is the central question of legal theory and it is a the heart of the academic study of law.
And when we focus on normative legal theory, Dworkin’s influence and importance comes back into perspective. Of course, Raz has important things to say about the normative foundations of law, but judgments about the importance of his work on foundational normative questions are not the the subject of the same kind of wide and deep agreement as are judgments about the importance of his work on the nature of law. But it is, I think, beyond doubt that Dworkin’s normative work has had a profound influence on contemporary normative legal theory.
Read Leiter’s post & if you are at all interested in getting a broad overview of analytic philosophy in the United States, read Soame’s accessible essay.