ABSTRACT
The essays in this collection range over issues of law, legal theory and criminal responsibility. They move from the practical to the theoretical. They consider such matters as homicide law reform, self-defence and shoot to kill, mercy killing and assisted suicide, and growing authoritarianism in the criminal law. They relate these issues to questions about the evolving historical shape of the law and whether it is susceptible to rational understanding, what we mean by good and evil, the nature of moral, legal and political responsibility, and the relationship between criminal justice, moral freedom and human solidarity. Some of these deeper issues are developed from considering the problem of war guilt. Their overall concern, however, is with understanding how law can be seen as a specific form of regulation that is at once social, political and ethical, yet remains at its core legal. That concern focuses on the relationship between the part (the law) and the whole (the social, political and ethical milieu in which it operates). Amongst the questions this generates are these: how does law judge? And how
should we judge that judgment? The first question arises from the sense of a specifically legal form of judgment. What does that mean, and what is the nature of the part that is law? The second arises from the observation that legal judgment is emergent from a broader context in which it continues to reside, so what is the relationship between the part and the whole?
