Ronald Dworkin on Alito: He'd better be wrong

You can read Dworkin's article on the NYRB, here is an electronic version.

At times, I wonder whether Dworkin is jokin or he's serious. In this article he laments the conservative bias of Judge Alito. What did he expect? An ultra liberal elected by George Bush? This is (literally) like asking the Pope to bless homosexual marriages.

This is his conclusion:

'It is dangerous to predict what the Supreme Court, or indeed any justice, will do, and I hope my fears will turn out to be exaggerated. Justice Anthony Kennedy now replaces Justice O'Connor as the swing vote, and several of his recent opinions are encouraging (for example, his argument that the federal government could not prohibit Oregon's assisted suicide plan). But there seems little doubt that the Court will now move to the right. We may be on the edge of a new, long, and much darker era of our constitutional history.'

If anything, we learn that Dworkin will never become a Justice of the Supreme Court.