Ronald Dworkin, RIP

I don't know enough about legal theory to judge his work in that area, for which he was best known, with any confidence. But I found his views on distributive justice and equality particularly attractive. The seminal essays are "What is equality?" parts 1 and 2. There remain plenty of challenges in developing a coherent theory of equality of resources or opportunity, but he made progress. Somewhere in this argument lie the foundations of a version of egalitarianism that Americans in particular can live with, and thus the basis in ideas for an American kind of left-liberalism. And I will surely miss his combative court reporting in the NY Review of Books.