Justice and the Slaughter Bench

<p>In this follow-up to <i>Law and the Beautiful Soul</i> 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.</p>