• The first paragraph of §III gives a fuller statement of Dworkin’s rights thesis. The reference to institutional rights, which he expands on in the rest of the section, is a key point for distinguishing Dworkin’s view from both legal positivism and a straightforward natural law theory. As will become clear later, although institutional rights need not coincide with background moral rights, considerations of morality can play a role in deciding what institutional rights are. This is because the selection of a conception to fill out a contested concept (see p. 1080) will involve deciding what construction of the character of an institution puts it in the best light. And in the case of legal institutions, that will involve asking what is best from the point of view of what Dworkin sometimes calls “political morality.”

In section IV, which is divided into a number of subsections, Dworkin applies his rights thesis to specific aspects of the law. Section IV.A concerns law whose source is legislation. When reading its introductory paragraphs (pp. 1082f), be sure to note why Hercules is given that name.

• This time we will look only at the first subsection of IV.A, which concerns constitutional law. Its two longer paragraphs (pp. 1083f) deal, respectively, with Hercules’ references to “institutional detail” and to “political philosophy” (to use the terms of Dworkin’s concluding paragraph). Think about the different roles the two play in Dworkin’s view and the difference between the roles he assigns to the two of them and the roles that would be assigned to them by a simple natural law theory.