Justice and the Slaughter Bench : Essays on Law's Broken Dialectic

In this follow-up to Alan Norrie’s Law and the Beautiful Soul (Routledge, 2005), Alan Norrie addresses the unresolved split between legal and ethical judgment. This split is seen as a product of the historical shaping of legal judgment, such that its abstraction and formalism both eschew ethical judgment, but also require it. Covering a range of issues – including self defence, euthanasia, and war guilt – this exposition of the problematic relationship between legal and ethical judgment makes an important contribution to the central questions in law and legal theory, as well as criminal justice.

In this follow-up to Law and the Beautiful Soul, Alan Norrie addresses the split between legal and ethical judgment. Shaped by history, law’s formalism both eschews and requires ethics. The first essays consider legal form in its practical aspect, and the ethical problems encountered (‘law’s architectonic’). The later essays look at the complex underlying relation between law and ethics (‘law’s constellation’). In Hegel’s philosophy, legal and ethical judgment are brought together in a rational totality. Here, the synthesis remains unachieved, the dialectic systematically ‘broken’. These essays cover such issues as criminal law’s ‘general part’, homicide reform, self-defence, euthanasia, and war guilt. They interrogate legal problems, consider law’s method, and its place in the social whole. The analysis of law’s historicity, its formalism and its relation to ethics contributes importantly to central questions in law, legal theory and criminal justice.