Justice and the Slaughter Bench

In this follow-up to Law and the Beautiful Soul, Alan Norrie addresses the split between legal and ethical judgment. Shaped by history, laws formalism both eschews and requires ethics. The first essays consider legal form in its practical aspect, and the ethical problems encountered (laws architectonic). The later essays look at the complex underlying relation between law and ethics (laws constellation). In Hegels 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 laws general part, homicide reform, self-defence, euthanasia, and war guilt. They interrogate legal problems, consider laws method, and its place in the social whole. The analysis of laws historicity, its formalism and its relation to ethics contributes importantly to central questions in law, legal theory and criminal justice.