 While Finnis and Fuller’s views are thus compatible with the positivist thesis, the same cannot be said of Ronald Dworkin’s important works (Dworkin 1978, 1986 and 2011). Positivism’s most influential critic rejects the theory on every conceivable level. He denies that there can be any general theory of the existence and content of law; he denies that local theories of particular legal systems can identify law without recourse to its merits, and he rejects the whole institutional focus of positivism. A theory of law is for Dworkin a theory of how cases ought to be decided and it begins, not with an account of political organization, but with an abstract ideal regulating the conditions under which governments may use coercive force over their subjects. Coercion must not be deployed, he claims, 