Revisiting the Parent–Child Analogy: Implications for Law and Judgment

Abstract

In order to explore the overlap between individual judgment and legal judgment, I turn to the parent–child analogy (the state is to the subject as the parent is to the child), historically much used to support the validity and basic rightness of the state’s judgment. In this commentary, I examine how the very dynamic and contested nature of the modern parent–child relationship makes the state–subject relationship, its contemporary and correlative, particularly problematic. Specifically, I argue, it destabilizes the idea of judgment and the supposed distinction between state judgment and human subject judgment; and in so doing, it undermines the notion of “the law” as a distinct and independent entity.