Jurisprudence on the Frontline

Abstract

In an article preceding his latest book, Law and Irresponsibility: On the Legitimation of Human Suffering , Scott Veitch posed the following challenge to contemporary jurisprudence: ‘ [i]t says a great deal ... about the state of “ jurisprudence ” in Britain that, while vast amounts of time and intellectual energy are spent debating the values of legal positivism versus natural law theorising, the British government had been involved in a legal enterprise [in Iraq] which was killing vast amounts of people for a number of years, and yet this did not register in jurisprudential debates about the best ways to understand the relation between law and morality ’ . 1 Veitch’s book, Law and Irresponsibility , falls like a bomb into what he called, in that article, ‘ the amnesiac politics of these academic practices ’ . 2 The book’s central concern is also indicated in the quotation from the above-cited article: Veitch referred there to the British war in Iraq as ‘ a legal enterprise which was killing vast amounts of people for a number of years ’ (emphasis added). The UN sanctions regime in Iraq in the 1990s, says Veitch, was not an extra-legal operation. Rather, he says, the deaths of the Iraq people were the result of actions rooted ‘ fi rmly in legality ’ ; their deaths were ‘ authorised by the normative ordering provided by international law ’ (at 2). Veitch’s running theme is that ‘ legal institutions are centrally involved in organising irresponsibility ’ (at 1; emphasis added) – a theme he pursues vigorously and passionately in the contexts of the sanctions regime in Iraq, the stolen generation in Australia, the legacy of apartheid in South Africa, and the threat of nuclear weapons.