November 2025

This is the first in an occasional Zealous series exploring major legal philosophers, with the aim of demonstrating why their ideas should matter to anyone who currently practices law.

We begin with Ronald Dworkin (pictured), because his central insight reframes a question every constitutional lawyer encounters: how can unelected judges legitimately override the will of democratically elected legislatures?

Ronald Dworkin (1931–2013) was among the most influential legal philosophers of the twentieth century. After graduating summa cum laude from Harvard and studying at Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, where his examination so impressed the faculty that H.L.A. Hart himself was summoned to read it, Dworkin clerked for the legendary Judge Learned Hand before joining Sullivan & Cromwell. He left practice for the academy in 1962, eventually succeeding Hart in Oxford’s Chair of Jurisprudence and later holding positions at NYU and University College London.

Bryan Stevenson has spent four decades doing what many lawyers claim they want to do, but few actually commit to doing: fighting for the powerless.

As founder and executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative in Montgomery, Alabama, a state with the highest per capita rate of death penalty sentencing, Stevenson has dedicated his career to challenging mass incarceration, excessive punishment, and racial injustice in the American legal system.

Few can match the number of US Supreme Court victories Stevenson has secured, including a 2019 ruling protecting condemned prisoners who suffer from dementia, and a landmark 2012 ruling that banned mandatory life-without-parole sentences for all children 17 or younger. Stevenson and the staff of EJI have won reversals, relief, or release from prison for over 135 wrongly condemned prisoners on death row, and won relief for hundreds of others wrongly convicted or unfairly sentenced. His work has literally saved lives.