| Law and Irresponsibility: On the Legitimation of Human Suffering Contributor(s): Veitch, Scott (Author) |
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ISBN: 0415442516 ISBN-13: 9780415442510 Publisher: Routledge Cavendish OUR PRICE: $58.89 Product Type: Paperback - Other Formats Published: November 2007 Annotation: It is commonly understood that in its focus on rights and obligations law is centrally concerned with organising responsibility. In defining how obligations are created, in contract or property law, say, or imposed, as in tort, public, or criminal law, law and legal institutions are usually seen as societys key mode of asserting and defining the content and scope of responsibilities. This book takes the converse view: legal institutions are centrally involved in organising irresponsibility. Particularly with respect to the production of large-scale harms including extensive human rights violations, forms of colonialism, or environmental or nuclear devastation and in opposition to conventional understandings of responsibility in law, morality and politics, the book provides a detailed analysis of the ways in which legal institutions their practices, concepts, and categories themselves operate as much to deflect responsibility for harms suffered as they do to acknowledge them. Drawing on a series of case studies from local, national, and global concerns the book analyses how law facilitates dispersals and disavowals of responsibility, and it shows how it does so in consistent and patterned ways. In assessing how this organised irresponsibility operates, and what its consequences are for both legal analysis and society generally, a thoroughgoing re-evaluation of laws methods, operation, and consequences is required. At stake is nothing less than a fundamental re-assessment of the role of modern law in the production and legitimation of human suffering. This innovative and interdisciplinary book provides a sustained challenge to conventional thinking about law and legalinstitutions. It will be of major interest to those working in law, political and legal theory, sociology and moral philosophy. |
| Additional Information |
| BISAC Categories: - Law | Natural Law |
| Dewey: 340.112 |
| LCCN: 2007024472 |
| Physical Information: 0.38" H x 6.39" W x 9.04" (0.58 lbs) 168 pages |
| Descriptions, Reviews, Etc. |
| Publisher Description: Law is widely assumed to provide contemporary society with its most important means of organizing responsibility. Across a broad range of areas of social life - from the activities of states and citizens, to work, business and private relationships - it is understood that legal regulation plays a crucial role in defining and limiting responsibilities. But Law and Irresponsibility pursues the opposite view: it explores how law organizes irresponsibility. With a particular focus on large-scale harms - including extensive human rights violations, forms of colonialism, and environmental or nuclear devastation - this book analyzes the ways in which law legitimates human suffering by demonstrating how legal institutions operate as much to deflect responsibility for harms suffered as to acknowledge them. Drawing on a series of case studies, it shows not only how law facilitates the dispersal and disavowal of responsibility, but how it does so in consistent and patterned ways. Irresponsibility is organized, and its organization is traced here to the legal forms, and the social and political conditions, that sustain 'our' complicity in human suffering. This innovative and interdisciplinary book provides a radical challenge to conventional thinking about law and legal institutions. It will be of considerable interest to those working in law, political and legal theory, sociology and moral philosophy.
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