Lethe's Law: Justice, Law, and Ethics in Reconciliation

"This book offers a series of original essays by an international group of scholars whose work looks comparatively at law's attempts to deal with the past. Ranging from questions of criminal responsibility and amnesty to those of law's relation to time, memory, and the ethics of reconciliation, it is a sustained jurisprudential and philosophical analysis of one of the most important and pressing legal concerns of our time. Among its key concerns is that justice's demand on law has changed and, in the face of a divided and violent past, law is being called on to do the kind of work it ordinarily shuns. What this means for conventional understandings of law, as well as for the relation between law and politics in times of transition, is explored through a discussion of experiences from Eastern Europe and Germany, to South Africa, Israel, and Australia. The book thus provides a timely investigation of the nature of law and legal institutions in times of political and social change, and will appeal to a broad international audience including lawyers, political theorists, criminologists, and philosophers."--Bloomsbury Publishing. Half Title Page......Page 1 Half Title verso......Page 2 Title Page......Page 3 Title verso......Page 4 Contents......Page 5 List of Contributors......Page 7 Introduction......Page 9 Part I. Criminal Law, Amnesty and Time......Page 17 Introduction......Page 19 The Problems of Punishment......Page 20 Renouncing Criminal Proceedings......Page 21 Guilt......Page 24 Guilty Persons or Guilty Citizens?......Page 25 Neutralisation......Page 27 Guilt and Memory......Page 29 Conclusion......Page 30 Introduction......Page 33 Background to the Discussion......Page 34 The Amnesty Debate in Germany......Page 35 Conceptual Problems with Traditional Discussions of Amnesties......Page 39 Amnesty and Damnatio Memoriae......Page 43 3. The Legal Politics of Amnesty......Page 49 There but for the Grace of Law......Page 51 Amnesty and Legal Reasoning......Page 53 4. Time, Guilt and Forgiveness......Page 63 Stale Crimes: Differing Approaches......Page 64 Criminal Law, The Past and Guilt......Page 66 Reactive Attitudes in the Law......Page 70 Forgiveness......Page 73 Part II. Justice Between Past and Future......Page 79 5. "With the Benefit of Hindsight": Dilemmas of Legality in the Face of Injustice......Page 81 The Case of Bram Fischer......Page 85 Dilemmas of the Rule of Law......Page 94 Truth, Memory and the Rule of Law......Page 98 Postcript......Page 102 6. "Nothing but the Truth": the South African Alternative to Corrective Justice in Transitions to Democracy......Page 107 Truth and Justice......Page 108 Truth and Politics......Page 113 Truth as Process......Page 116 Truth as Product......Page 122 Conclusion......Page 128 Introduction......Page 131 Law's Time......Page 133 Law and Collective Memories......Page 134 Legal Institutions and Their New Tasks......Page 138 Remembering, Forgetting and Legal Institutions......Page 140 Quasi-Judicial Institutions and Transitional Justice......Page 141 Conclusion......Page 144 Introduction......Page 145 Institutional and Social Reconstruction......Page 147 Beyond Accountability......Page 148 Law's Constitutive Function and Its Limitations......Page 152 Law and Reconciliation......Page 160 Conclusion......Page 164 Part III. Memory and the Ethics of Reconciliation......Page 167 9. Justice or Reconciliation? The Politicisation of the Holocaust in the Kastner Trial......Page 169 A Socio-Legal Binary Structure......Page 173 The Re-enactment of a Past Trauma in the Courtroom......Page 176 The Manipulation of the Legal Discourse of "Truth"......Page 182 Conclusion: Between Memory and History......Page 187 Introduction: Reconciliation as a Political Process......Page 191 Covering and Uncovering: The Ambivalence of Truth......Page 193 The Unconditionality of Reconciliation......Page 195 Virtual Reciprocity......Page 197 The Embarrassment of the First Person Plural......Page 200 Reconciliation and Law......Page 203 Introduction Contexts......Page 207 Problems......Page 211 Ideas......Page 215 12. Law's Immemorial......Page 223 The Immemorial......Page 228 Memory, Time and the Law......Page 231 Law's Time......Page 233 The Example of Collective Memory......Page 236 Law's Immemorial......Page 238 Conclusion......Page 242 Index......Page 245 "This book offers a series of essays by an international group of scholars whose work looks comparatively at law's attempts to deal with the past. Ranging from questions of criminal responsibility and amnesty to those of law's relation to time, memory and the ethics of reconciliation, it is a sustained jurisprudential and philosophical analysis of one of the most important and pressing legal concerns of our time." "Among its key concerns is that justice's demand on law has changed and, in the face of a divided and violent past, law is being called on to do the kind of work it ordinarily shuns. What this means for conventional understandings of law, as well as for the relation between law and politics in times of transition, is explored through a discussion of experiences from Eastern Europe and Germany, to South Africa, Israel and Australia." "The book thus provides a timely investigation of the nature of law and legal institutions in times of political and social change, and will appeal to a broad international audience including lawyers, political theorists, criminologists and philosophers."--BOOK JACKET Annotation This book offers a series of original essays by an international group of scholars whose work looks comparatively at law's attempts to deal with the past. Ranging from questions of criminal responsibility and amnesty to those of law's relation to time,memory, and the ethics of reconciliation, it is a sustained jurisprudential and philosophical analysis of one of the most important and pressing legal concerns of our time.Among its key concerns is that justice's demand on law has changed and, in the face of a divided and violent past, law is being called on to do the kind of work it ordinarily shuns. What this means for conventional understandings of law, as well as for the relation between law and politics in times of transition, is explored through a discussion of experiences from Eastern Europe and Germany, to South Africa, Israel, and Australia.The book thus provides a timely investigation of the nature of law and legal institutions in times of political and social change, and will appeal to a broad international audience including lawyers, political theorists, criminologists, and philosophers