We are reading Altman to make up for the fact that Unger does not speak very explicitly of the relation between his views and Dworkin’s. Altman’s chief aim in this paper is to show ways in which the views of someone like Unger can be seen to provide the basis for criticisms of Dworkin.

Your assignment begins a little way into Altman’s paper. In the first few sections Altman has discussed Legal Realism and the responses to its views that can be found in Hart and Dworkin. We will be looking at the part of his discussion where he considers the views of the Critical Legal Studies movement. (Part of Altman’s introduction to the CLS movement appears in the second paragraph of note 27—which is on the page before your assignment begins—and you may want to look back at that.) This discussion is divided into three sections (followed by a short concluding section).

• Section IV (pp. 216-222) is probably the most important in the paper. Here Altman not only outlines the aspects of CLS that he thinks provide a basis for arguments against Dworkin but also has some things to say about the means he thinks Dworkin has available to him in constructing a reply and what is required for such a reply to be convincing. Notice especially the idea of a patchwork quilt (p. 222). It can be contrasted with Dworkin’s idea that judges should see that law as a “seamless web.” Notice also Altman’s insistence that Dworkin’s view of the law is defensible only if its integrity can be displayed in the sorts of theories actual judges can construct (see p. 220). Do you think he is right about that?

The argument against Dworkin in this section is only that he has not shown that there can be the sort of “soundest theory of the settled law” that is central to his view. (Altman presents his account of this aspect of Dworkin’s theory on pp. 213f.) The next two sections provide reasons for thinking there cannot be such theory.

• The argument in section V (pp. 222-227) is the one most directly based on the idea that law is a patchwork. It asserts that the law is fundamentally incoherent ideologically, with incompatible sets of principles applied in different areas. It is crucial for this argument that it be implausible that the divergence between such areas of the law can be explained by a “metaprinciple” assigning differing relative weights to principles in these areas (see p. 218 in Altman for the idea of such a “metaprinciple”). Altman cannot here present the range of descriptive studies of the law that might support the CLS claim but he does provide a brief sketch of one in the quotation from Kennedy on p. 225.

• In section VI (pp. 227-234), Altman presents the second argument against Dworkin he finds in the CLS movement. This turns on a view Altman had earlier described also as the central tenet of Legal Realism, that there is no principled distinction between adjudication and politics (see the end of note 4, p. 206). This idea appears in two arguments Altman sketches on pp. 230f, and he considers possible replies by Dworkin on pp. 232f. Think about Altman’s assessment of these replies at the end of the section, especially on the first half of p. 234.