At least he didn’t tell too many jokes… ;)

That is true of much highly-regarded legal scholarship. So much the worse for highly-regarded legal scholarship.

I haven’t read a great deal of legal philosophy/jurisprudence, but I’ve read enough contemporary academic work in the social sciences and in political theory to be able to say with some confidence that there is a lot of bad writing out there.

I have to agree with all that Matt has said about Dworkin. After reading Law’s Empire for a long time, quite intensely, I repeatedly struggled to fully understand Dworkin’s position. I would dispute any suggestion that Dworkin was a lucid writer. Certainly Dworkin is an entertaining and often engaging writer, but that isn’t the same as being lucid. Many people present themselves as understanding Dworkin: I have to say that I always doubt the veracity of any such claims made.

Nevertheless, there’s no doubting his immense influence and lifelong contribution to both fields. Truly a sad loss to philosophy.

I studied more Dworkin than I cared to under Dyzenhaus. I hated it. I would actually go so far as to say that he often was trying to put one over on the reader, and that the underlying arguments were very weak unless you were predisposed to his conclusions. The popularity of his jurisprudence is IMO largely a function of it being very convenient and flattering for judges and/or the religious.

That could be. You’ve read a lot more Dworkin than I have, I’m sure. But I’d rather read a good writer and “take special care…not to be carried along.” Not everyone needs to write as fluidly as he did, and not everyone should be expected to — for one thing, some subjects don’t lend themselves to a such a graceful, fluent exposition. But especially given the atrocious, truly abominable level of copyediting at some university presses and other presses these days, I think academic writers need to pay even more attention to their prose than they had to in the past.

This was true, but more and more as time went by, I wondered if it was all for the good. The more I read him, the more I found it hard to figure out what, exactly, the argument was, at least at certain crucial points, and why I had thought I’d seen it before. I’ve come to suspect that his very fluid writing sometimes covered up the weaker of his arguments, and made people, including me, miss the gaps. Supposedly Henry Sidgwick, especially later in his career, deliberately tried to strip all artifice from his writing, so that if people were convinced by it, it would have to be by the argument itself, and not the form. That’s perhaps going a bit too far, but I do think there is reason to take special care when reading very good writers, so as not to be carried along by the form rather than the substance.
(I should say, I don’t at all think that Dworkin was trying to put one over on people, just that I think that sometimes the fluidity of his writing filled in gaps in his arguments.)

Yes, a very creative thinker, on many topics, and an incisive critic. I attended a large paper-reading/discussion group he was part of in Oxford in the mid-80s. It was understood that he would always ask the first question in the Q&A and it was right that he should: he always went right to the heart of whatever presentation had been given. He was the best at that of anyone I’ve ever seen.