ABSTRACT
Law reveals that life is not what it ought to be. A world without injustices would require no law, since a legal order is necessary only when humans must punish crimes, regulate their interactions with contracts, and uphold commitments which they may be tempted or forced to break. The author of the First Epistle to Timothy expressed this clearly when writing that “the law is not stated for the righteous” and a Greek comedian once wrote that “if the human were not so bad, there would be no law.” 1 Our book explores this paradox, tracing the reemergence of the philosophical and theological intuition that the good life implies the end of law in three seminal twentieth-century legal arguments: the Radbruch formula from 1946, Hart's discussion on the minimum content of natural law from 1961, and the Böckenförde dilemma from 1967. Gustav Radbruch discussed the problem of statutory lawlessness or Gesetzliches Unrecht and sought a solution in what is often called natural law; H. L. A. Hart suggested that survival is at the core of law, and that law is not ultimately about coercion but instruction and freedom; and Ernst-Wolfgang Böckenförde insisted on the meta-juridical and hence non-legal foundations of the secular state. We will demonstrate how all three thinkers raise the question of the end of law and argue that this has significant implications for how we should understand law, whether it is divine, natural, or positive.
