Law's Task

What is the ultimate task of law? This deceptively simple question guides this volume towards a radically original philosophical interpretation of law and justice. Weaving together the philosophical, jurisprudential and ethical problems suggested by the general terms thinking, human suffering, legal meaning, time and tragedy, the book places the idea of law's ultimate task in the context of what actually happens when people seek to do justice and enforce legal rights in a world that is inflected by the desperation and suffering of the many. It traces the rule of law all the way down to its most fundamental level: universal human suffering.The book argues that what we ordinarily call 'law' and 'justice' are most properly viewed not as objects, ideas, or even institutions, but rather as mere linguistic signs and ephemeral images woven into the temporal event of dividing universal human suffering into parts: the lawful and the unlawful, the just and the unjust, and the right and the wrong. Yet the very event of noticing and labelling some kinds of suffering as 'unjust' ignores and generates other kinds of suffering. Although law's tendency towards partiality and brutality is useful for maintaining existing relations of domination and resistance in society, it remains ethically invisible to those who actually perform law's task on a day-to-day basis.As Jesus is said to have alleged of the Romans, modern day law-doers quite literally do not know what they are doing. The book's most fundamental message is that the practitioners of law and justice participate in a human tragedy - a sort of fellowship of sadness - and that their pitiable attempts to provide foundational accounts of legal practice represent a hopeless effort to evade their existential and ethical responsibility for each and every legal outcome in which they participate.