ABSTRACT
This chapter demonstrates that adjudicative temporalities enable legal judgement to either visibilise or elide social structures in its determination of facts and shows how this determines criminal responsibility. It argues that the uniformity component and presumptive identity in Abstract legal judgement is the product of the adjudicative temporalities that produce them. The important departure point that both Legal Realism and Critical Legal Studies (CLS) provide therefore is the decentring of the rule in adjudication. CLS scholars, applying Wittgenstein’s reflections on language, rules and indeterminacy, level their charges against the silent contradictions of legal liberalism in three pairs of rhetorical arguments: a simultaneous commitment to rigid rules and situation-sensitive standards, subjective and objective moral truths and free will and determinist discourses in legal thought and practice. The chapter also presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in this book.
