Sovereign Virtue: The Theory and Practice of Equality 
Equality is the endangered species of political ideals. Even left-of-center politicians reject equality as an ideal: government must combat poverty, they say, but need not strive that its citizens be equal in any dimension. In his new book Ronald Dworkin insists, to the contrary, that equality is the indispensable virtue of democratic sovereignty. A legitimate government must treat all its citizens as equals, that is, with equal respect and concern, and, since the economic distribution that any society achieves is mainly the consequence of its system of law and policy, that requirement imposes serious egalitarian constraints on that distribution.
What distribution of a nation's wealth is demanded by equal concern for all? Dworkin draws upon two fundamental humanist principles--first, it is of equal objective importance that all human lives flourish, and second, each person is responsible for defining and achieving the flourishing of his or her own life--to ground his well-known thesis that true equality means equality in the value of the resources that each person commands, not in the success he or she achieves. Equality, freedom, and individual responsibility are therefore not in conflict, but flow from and into one another as facets of the same humanist conception of life and politics. Since no abstract political theory can be understood except in the context of actual and complex political issues, Dworkin develops his thesis by applying it to heated contemporary controversies about the distribution of health care, unemployment benefits, campaign finance reform, affirmative action, assisted suicide, and genetic engineering.
Reviews
Professor Dworkin is no doubt a serious thinker and a very good writer. However, I am disappointed in his book. His theory in equality is well written but not well reasoned. It seems that the professor lives and thinks in the rarefied theoretical world, but tries to develop a theory that he hopes to put into practice for the real world.
Economists and demographists talk about a distribution as a manifested result of spontaneous transactions, such as the distribution income for a particular year. The professor's starting premises has to do with a notion of distribution of resources as an action, or the direct result of policies, by some dictating authority (the government). Although Dworkin tries not to make it sound like his views are socialistic, they in fact are.
Professor Dworkin takes great care to define his preferred notion equality to be distributional equality of resources. This immediately raises many problems: Who grants the control of resources? Where do these resources that are to be granted come from? Who decides what is a fair (equal) share, given the different needs of different people? What happens over time, when individual actions and choices create new inequalities? The professor is aware of these problems and theorizes on them. But no reasonable answers can be developed, except in small and/or theoretical cases such as a father in a position to will his assets to his off-springs, or what happens after a shipwreck on a desert island.
I did not finish reading the entire book - I could not justify spending time to continue after I concluded that foundation of his theory, as well as much of his "theorized practice" were so wholly academic that they placed serious limits on the usefulness of the theory itself. Anyway, in all fairness, you should give more weight to those who have read the entire book.
For those who seriously ponder on the related issue of equality, fairness and justice, I would highly recommend "The Quest for Cosmic Justice" by Thomas Sowell. You will be spared the tedious academic theorizing and get a lucid, well-reasoned dissertation on the subject.
True, this portion of the book is theory, but his theories are fantasies. They're not realistic at all.
The second half of the book is his attempt to put into practice the idealistic proposals in the first half.
I found this book good as a text if you want to teach a class on contemporary political philosophy, but only if you are looking to get your students thinking about a large number of current issues and improve their critical thinking skills. If you're trying to give them examples of how to think or give a good representation of solid liberal political thought, I would pass this one by.
Let me give an example of Dworkin's bias and poor research. In Chapter 11, "Affirmative Action, Does It Work?", Dworkin's answer is a profound "YES!!" But to support his view, he uses one study and one study alone, Bowen and Bok's "The Shape of the River." He only mentions "American in Black and White" which, by the way, destroys his argument. The River study looks only at a very narrow sample, blacks in elite educational institutions. As a friend and fellow student said, "If I were to write chapter 11 as a term paper, it would have been returned to me with an extremely low grade or a request to support my view with more research." The reader gets the idea that either Dworkin couldn't find any other material which supported his view, or he was just lazy in looking. Which brings up another interesting facet of this book. It seems Dworkin came to the table with views and looked for materials to support those views. He does not come across as open and objective at all.
Sovereign Virtue gives the impression Dworkin may have sat down and knocked this out in a weekend or two without any peer review. If you're interested in philosophy, especially liberal democratic political philosophy, look elsewhere. Al Franken might even be a better choice, but less of a joke.