ABSTRACT
What, and how, do law and legal institutions contribute to the organisation of irresponsibility? These are the questions that I will seek to answer in the course of this and the following chapter. This will involve investigating what is specific to the juridical realm in the contribution that it makes to the legitimation of human suffering. If it is the case that irresponsibility proliferates among practices of responsibility, as was argued in the previous chapter, then we would expect that law-as one of the most prominent social forms of organising responsibilities-will be deeply implicated in this. The purpose of what follows here, then, is to show how that expectation is, in fact, realised. In order to understand this fully, however, we need to pay attention not only to what constitutes the distinctiveness of juridical forms and institutions, but also to keep in mind that these forms and institutions variously draw on, augment or supplement the broader social forms we have just analysed.
