"Dignity and The Judge" by Mark L. Movsesian

Dignity and The Judge

Mark L. Movsesian

Among the Sierra Nevada, California by Albert Bierstadt (US-PD).

This article is part of our Book Review Roundtable on Andrea Pin’s book, Dignity in Judgement: Constitutional Adjudication in Comparative Perspective (2025).
If you’d like to check out other reviews in this series, click here.

Human dignity is ubiquitous in contemporary constitutional law. Courts across jurisdictions invoke the concept to resolve disputes about equality, punishment, religious liberty, and bioethics. Yet dignity is also deeply contested, its meaning varying not only from country to country but often from judge to judge on the same court. It is a paradox: commitment to the concept is universal, but its legal operation is particular, shaped by context and interpretation.

In Dignity in Judgment, Andrea Pin sets out to explain this phenomenon. He challenges the familiar narrative that constitutional law has properly converged on a secular, Kantian understanding of dignity grounded in autonomy and individual rights. He argues that this account is incomplete. Alongside it endures a more communal and often religiously rooted conception that continues to inform constitutional adjudication even when it is not expressly acknowledged. Judges and scholars, he writes, should not overlook that alternative tradition when describing or evaluating the law of dignity.

As Pin kindly notes in his acknowledgments, he and I have been carrying on a friendly debate about these questions for years. His book is an impressively learned and serious contribution to comparative constitutional law. But I read his evidence somewhat differently. The cases he examines do show that dignity has competing intellectual sources, some secular, some religious (9). They also suggest, however, that contemporary courts overwhelmingly employ the secular understanding in practice. The explanation, I suspect, lies in the intellectual formation of judges themselves.

Pin begins with a familiar account of dignity in contemporary constitutional law. In most constitutional and human-rights scholarship, dignity is understood primarily in Kantian terms as grounded in the equal moral worth and autonomy of the individual and therefore expressed in a framework of subjective rights (20). On this view, contemporary constitutional law reflects a broader intellectual development. Older, religiously informed understandings of dignity—which tended to emphasize duties, communal belonging, and an objective moral order—have gradually yielded to a secular, individualist conception centered on personal choice and self-determination.

Dignity in Judgment seeks to complicate that story. Pin examines how constitutional courts use the concept in practice. He explores leading decisions from the high courts of several jurisdictions—Canada, Colombia, Egypt, the European Union, and Israel. Courts are important for his purposes precisely because courts make the concept of dignity operational. Whatever the abstract meaning of dignity is, judges give the term concrete meaning in resolving particular cases.

From his comparative inquiry, Pin draws two conclusions. First, dignity does not work as a single, uniform principle across legal systems. Courts interpret the concept through their own legal cultures and intellectual inheritances. Second, the religious dimension of dignity has not disappeared from constitutional law. Even when judges do not explicitly rely on theological sources, communal and historically religious understandings of human worth continue to shape the jurisprudence. For that reason, he argues, both scholars and judges should resist describing dignity solely in secular, autonomy-based terms and should acknowledge the broader intellectual history from which the concept emerged. “If this book has reminded academics and judges that some parts of the history of dignity should not be omitted just because they do not fit a certain academic or judicial approach,” he writes, “it will have done its job” (p. 239).

Pin’s comparative chapters are among the most illuminating parts of his book. They demonstrate that dignity does not function as a fixed doctrinal rule but as a concept whose meaning is mediated by legal culture. Courts interpret the term through their own traditions and, as Pin emphasizes, through the intellectual formation and worldview of the judges who apply it. In that sense, dignity proves far more context-dependent than much constitutional theory assumes.

At the same time, the overall pattern is more uniform than he suggests. Even in jurisdictions whose legal traditions remain connected with religious sources, courts typically articulate dignity in the Kantian language of individual rights, autonomy, and universal legal principles (42). Canadian and Colombian jurisprudence, though arising in distinct legal cultures, typically frame dignity as the protection of personal autonomy. The Egyptian Supreme Constitutional Court, while formally invoking Islamic law, regularly resolves disputes by reference to “a Western-leaning notion of rights” (p. 130). In Israel, the universalist approach of Aharon Barak has prevailed over more expressly Jewish-law reasoning on dignity. Even in the EU—the best example for Pin’s thesis—the CJEU’s case law on dignity is divided, with a Kantian rights-based approach coexisting in tension with a more relational approach derived from Catholic thinking.

This convergence is notable because the surrounding societies differ sharply in religious history, political structure, and constitutional design. Pin suggests that public attitudes in some of these places—Israel is a good example—may not fully embrace the universalist approach. Yet constitutional law is not formed directly by popular sentiment. It is shaped through judicial interpretation. Across these diverse systems, judges have tended to resolve concrete disputes by employing a similar understanding of dignity: the secular one.

The explanation may lie in the character of constitutional adjudication itself. Concepts like dignity are not self-applying. They are open-ended legal terms whose content must be specified in the course of deciding particular disputes. The underlying questions implicate contested views about the person, the good life, and the community—questions of judgment. Adjudication is a form of practical reasoning shaped by legal training, professional norms, and intellectual inheritance. The concept of dignity is not a determinate principle that dictates outcomes but a vehicle through which that reasoning is expressed.

I suspect that this dynamic explains the convergence Pin observes across otherwise different constitutional systems. Contemporary judges, in many jurisdictions, have been educated within broadly similar legal and intellectual environments: How many judges on these constitutional courts, I wonder, have law degrees from influential Western universities, which tend to be very secular places?. Postwar constitutionalism and the influence of international human rights law have contributed to a shared vocabulary of rights and personal autonomy. When judges encounter the term “dignity,” then, they interpret it through those familiar categories. The resulting understanding does not necessarily reflect a conscious choice to reject religiously grounded accounts––although of course it might. The secular, autonomy-centered definition simply appears to be the natural legal meaning of the term.

Dignity does not so much constrain judgment as depend upon it. Because the concept lacks sharply defined boundaries, judges inevitably bring to it their prior commitments—their legal education, cultural background, and moral intuitions. The differences Pin identifies among jurisdictions, and even among judges within the same court, follow from this feature of adjudication (6).

Of course, Pin’s goal is to influence the way courts think about dignity: to inform, or perhaps to remind, judges that the concept has been understood in more than one way and that its intellectual history includes religious and communal traditions alongside the familiar autonomy-centered account. He thus might concede much of what I have written. If judges have come to see dignity in the same, secular way, Pin seeks to widen their perspective.

It might work. Possibly, awareness of dignity’s broader traditions will influence judicial reasoning over time. But I suspect it will take a generation. The comparative evidence Pin has assembled suggests that, for now, the working meaning of dignity in constitutional law remains firmly tied to the secular, universalist intellectual formation of the judges who apply it. Unless that formation changes dramatically, the operative meaning of dignity will not change either.

Dignity in Judgment demonstrates that the concept of dignity has never had a single intellectual source. Its history draws on multiple traditions, and Pin is right to insist that religious and communal strands are part of that inheritance. His book is therefore an important corrective to accounts that describe contemporary constitutional law as if it had simply settled a philosophical question once and for all.

At the same time, the comparative materials he presents illuminate a different feature of jurisprudence. Constitutional courts translate open-ended concepts into law through the exercise of judgment. And judgment, inevitably, reflects the formation of the judges who exercise it. Across diverse constitutional systems, judges have tended to interpret dignity through a similar set of categories, not because alternative understandings are unavailable, but because those categories have become part of their shared legal training and vocabulary. Pin’s study shows that dignity has many pasts. Its present, however, is shaped above all by the worldview of those who apply it. ♦