ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that William Macpherson's critical assessment of the social order and attempt to allow room for subjective accusation against agencies of the state should be understood as the turning point in the Stephen Lawrence case. It suggests that the representation of the events surrounding the murder of Stephen Lawrence can be read against a scapegoat model that shows how the social order sacrifices individuals in order to guarantee its own integrity. The chapter explores how Lawrence's death has sparked such an enormously complicated set of debates about the British justice system, police procedure and collective white western attitudes to ethnic minorities, that his individual attributes became obscured by wider sociopolitical motivations. It focuses on the discourse surrounding the police, the legal system, and the Macpherson report. Related to Girard's thesis of an ethics of the other, Laurence Thomas suggests the concept of moral deference as a secular version of the legalization of other's subjectivity.
