ABSTRACT
This chapter begins with a brief restatement of the antipodal ends of the spectrum of judgement, Abstract Legal Judgement (ALJ) and Concrete Legal Judgement (CLJ), describing their temporalities and how their temporalities shape their construction of facts. Distinctions between the outcomes and subsequent successes of the cases are explained through their differential adjudicative temporalities, which reveals a site of the politics of legal judgement that would otherwise be invisibilised. The chapter looks at a series of defences in criminal law cases. Defences are typically examples of a limited range of exculpatory claims that litigants can make but presume the construction of the liberal legal subject. The judicial construction of the legal event that gave content to the two limbs of the provocation defence in this particular case is an example of tending towards ALJ. In CLJ, the construction of the legal subject(s) and legal event is enriched by the production of and introspection into the variegated past.
