Dworkin on the Judge Sotomayor hearings

In New York Review of Books (September 24, 2009), professor Ronald Dworkin (NYU) comments on the Judge Sonia Sotomayor hearings in the Senate:

Justice Sotomayor: The Unjust Hearings

Excerpt:
"Her hearings could (.....) have been a particularly valuable opportunity to explain the complexity of constitutional issues to the public and thus improve public understanding of this crucially important aspect of our government. But she destroyed any possibility of that benefit in her opening statement when she proclaimed, and repeated at every opportunity throughout the hearings, that her constitutional philosophy is very simple: fidelity to the law. That empty statement perpetuated the silly and democratically harmful fiction that a judge can interpret the key abstract clauses of the United States Constitution without making controversial judgments of political morality in the light of his or her own political principles. Fidelity to law, as such, cannot be a constitutional philosophy because a judge needs a constitutional philosophy to decide what the law is."