Law and irresponsibility : on the legitimation of human suffering / Scott Veitch.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Veitch, Scott.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Law--Moral and ethical aspects.

Law.

Responsibility.

Human rights.

Physical Description:

x, 157 pages ; 24 cm

Place of Publication:

Abingdon [England] ; New York : Routledge-Cavendish, 2007.

Summary:

Law is widely assumed to provide contemporary society with its most important means of organising 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 organises irresponsibility.

With a particular focus on large-scale harms - including extensive human rights violations, forms of colonialism, and environmental or nuclear devastation - this book analyses 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 organised. And its organisation 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.

Contents:

The disavowals of legality

Social structures and the dispersal of responsibilities

The laws of irresponsibility

Complicity in organised irresponsibility.

Notes:

"A GlassHouse book."

Includes bibliographical references (pages [147]-153) and index.

ISBN:

9780415442503

0415442508

9780415442510

0415442516

9780203940396

0203940393

OCLC:

144598155

Online:

Publisher description