Law and justice in postmodernity

Abstract

An apparent paradox characterizes contemporary law. The legal system is going through a serious crisis while jurisprudence is enjoying something of a renaissance. At the turn of the millennium, law faces a crisis of form and a demand for ethics. To start with ethics, over the last twenty years a widely felt sense that justice has miscarried has been evident. In the United Kingdom, justice has been aborted in miscarriages of justice and denials of access to justice, in racial and gender discrimination, in institutional violence and legal dogmatism. Many recent legal reforms, most importantly the introduction of the Human Rights Act 1998 and various measures against institutional racism in the police and other state agencies, aim at removing the worst cases of abuse, but they have been criticized for timidity. But, for the legal scholar, the question is somewhat different. How is it that we came to the point where the legal system appears to be almost divorced from considerations of morality? Michel Foucault has called the great eighteenth-century civil lawyers who stood against the autocratic state “universal intellectuals”: the “man of justice, the man of law, he who opposes to power, despotism, the abuses and arrogance of wealth, the universality of justice and the equity of an ideal law.” Postmodernity has undermined our belief in the universality of law or in the ability of an ideal equity to ground its operations. What is the meaning of justice in a world of cognitive and moral uncertainties?