On the Square Today

William Doino Jr. on Pope Benedict’s greatest lesson :

However history remembers Pope Benedict, one thing is assured: his reign will be remembered as one of the great teaching pontificates. Even those who question other aspects of it, praise it for that. “Where the Church has emerged especially strong under Benedict,” wrote the  Los Angeles Times , “is in its intellectual discourse, elevated by a professorial pope who dedicated considerable time and energy to a series of highly regarded encyclicals and three books on the life of Jesus.”

Also today, Robert T. Miller on the death of Ronald Dworkin :

Ronald Dworkin has died. In  Taking Rights Seriously , his first major work, published in 1977, he mounted a powerful assault on the legal positivism of his mentor, H. L. A. Hart. Dworkin would go on to become one of the greatest legal philosophers of the age. The only people in his class were Hart himself and Joseph Raz, and many people think that the greatest of the three was Dworkin. His single most important work was  Law’s Empire , which sets out his mature theory of law: law is an irreducibly moral enterprise (“Moral principle is the foundation of law”), and morality is an objective matter in which truth and falsity are independent of what individuals may wish or like.