On the happy occasion of the establishment of the Rutgers Institute for Law and Philosophy—happy not only for the faculty and students of Rutgers University, but also for the field of jurisprudence more generally—it seems appropriate to take stock of the field of law and philosophy over the past quarter-century, to see where the field has been, where it is going, and what it is now time to leave behind. On the latter score, I shall focus, in particular, on the well-known and distinctive jurisprudential contributions of Ronald Dworkin, especially as crystallized in his 1986 book Law’s Empire, which are now, I fear, a prime candidate for views the field has outgrown. This may seem a surprising suggestion to many outside the field of legal philosophy, but, as I shall suggest, it is increasingly the sotto voce—and sometimes manifest—consensus within.

(Brian Leiter, “The End of Empire: Dworkin and Jurisprudence in the 21st Century,” Rutgers Law Journal 36 [fall 2004]: 165-81, at 165)

Note from KBJ: Brian Leiter’s thuggery is not limited to his blog. In case you haven’t been paying attention, he has done such things as (1) call Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts “depraved and repellent,” (2) call Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas a “lunatic,” (3) describe the Bush administration as a “bestiary of madmen,” (4) refer to University of Tennessee law professor Glenn Reynolds as “InstaIgnorance,” (5) describe UCLA law professor Eugene Volokh as “juvenile,” “sleazy,” “hypocritical,” and “intellectually limited,” (6) call Michelle Malkin a “crypto-fascist,” (7) call two of his colleagues “latent homosexuals” for opposing homosexual “marriage,” (8) “out” a former graduate-school classmate who had the gall to criticize Leiter, (9) threaten a graduate student, (10) try to keep untenured professors at other universities from being tenured, (11) try to keep a law student who wrote a favorable review of a book on Design Theory from being hired by law firms, (12) incite violence against James Taranto, (13) encourage his sycophants to make anonymous personal attacks on various conservative professors (including yours truly), (14) defame me by making outrageously false statements in private correspondence (I have the letters, which will come out in due course), and (15) try to keep a professor from being hired by another department at his university—for ideological reasons. University of Wisconsin law professor Ann Althouse calls Leiter a “jackass.”  Yale University law professor Jules Coleman, who knows Leiter well, told me, in response to my query whether Leiter is mentally ill, that Leiter is “complicated.” Three years ago, in the Rutgers Law Journal, Leiter did a hatchet job on Ronald Dworkin, who has been described by Coleman as one of two “giants of contemporary analytic jurisprudence” (the other being H. L. A. Hart). Why would Leiter stoop to such a thing? I’ve come up with five explanations:

1. Dworkin ignores Leiter. To my knowledge, Dworkin has never mentioned Leiter in any published work. This, to a megalomaniac like Leiter, is an unpardonable sin.

2. Dworkin wrote a scathing review of Jules Coleman’s book The Practice of Principle. Coleman is Leiter’s patron. Leiter is repaying Coleman by serving as his henchman.

3. Dworkin, a liberal, is too conservative for Leiter, whose politics are on the lunatic fringe. Dworkin believes that judges must not make policy. Leiter believes that judges are legislators who do nothing but make policy.

4. Dworkin believes that there are right answers to legal questions. Leiter thinks this is absurd.

5. Dworkin views law as an autonomous institution. Leiter views law as politics.

It’s one thing to rant in a blog; it’s quite another to devote an entire scholarly article to attacking someone.