ABSTRACT
Sometimes, one describes a particular legal event as a “travesty of justice”. Such a statement suggests that justice precedes posited laws. Justice is often believed to transcend any historically contingent event. And when one turns to legal philosophers, justice is frequently associated with the founding authority of authored laws. Thomas Hobbes and Jean-Jacques Rousseau accepted such a juxtaposition between authority and authored laws when they distinguished historically contingent laws from their foundation in a prior state of nature. Jeremy Bentham and John Austin, too, elevated the evaluation of posited laws to what Bentham called a ‘metaphysics’ of ‘the greatest happiness of the greatest number’. For Hans Kelsen, one a priori norm, the Grundnorm, lay at the foundation of all legal reasoning. H.L.A. Hart insisted that ‘unspoken judicial practices’ grounded the concept of law and that lawyers could only approximate such unspoken practices. Joseph Raz and Ronald Dworkin also understood authority in terms of a source (in Raz’s case) or a grand narrative (in Dworkin’s) to differentiate laws from the violent acts of an outlaw. The authority of civil laws was projected external to the laws. If one could only identify such an external transcendent source, suffering would be eradicated it might seem.
