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

Description

This title 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.

Emilios Christodoulidis is a Reader in law at the University of Edinburgh. Scott Veitch is a Reader in Law at the University of Glasgow.

Lethe's Law is a timely collection of well-informed and theoretically sophisticated scholarship. Lethe's Law is thus an exciting and provocative collection of essays. Its achievements is to realise a diversity of politically and theoretically engaged analyses. For those working within the field, or interested in the wider implications of truth and reconciliation for political and social theory, it offers an essential and dynamic resource whose influence will be evidenced in scholarship to come. -- Adam Gearey * Legal Ethics *