Shklar's Legalism and the Liberal Paradox

Constellations 22 (2):188-198 (2015)
  Copy   BIBTEX

Abstract

This paper examines Judith Shklar’s Legalism in light of the paradox that emerges clearly from a law-based approach to international crises that ought to be evaluated on the basis of whether the judicial initiative—the cases examined are primarily drawn from ad hoc UN Security Council tribunals—promote, in Shklar’s words, “decent politics.” The question of whether this notion is exclusively related to liberalism, and whether it may run contrary to the role of defense counsel in such trials—deeply anchored in the liberal tradition of the protection of individual liberty, and yet confronted to the politics of international criminal law and international relations, however theorized—is fundamental, as “decent politics” compete with the legalistic imperatives of the defense, and the liberal foundation of the legal systems from which UN trials have emerged. Legalism provides a theoretical thread to examine the emergence of international criminal trials as well as the relation between the universality of law and history and the politics of memory, which figure prominently as political phenomena in these trials, but which may run contrary to the liberalism inherent in the legalist form.

Links

PhilArchive



    Upload a copy of this work     Papers currently archived: 90,616

External links

Setup an account with your affiliations in order to access resources via your University's proxy server

Through your library

Similar books and articles

Legalism.Judith N. Shklar - 1967 - Philosophical Review 76 (1):129-130.
What to Make of the Liberal Paradox?Mathias Risse - 2001 - Theory and Decision 50 (2):169-196.
Doubt and commitment: Justice and skepticism in Judith Shklar's thought.Shefali Misra - 2016 - European Journal of Political Theory 15 (1):77-96.
Legalism: law, morals, and political trials.Judith N. Shklar - 1964 - Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
Hope and memory in the thought of Judith Shklar.Katrina Forrester - 2011 - Modern Intellectual History 8 (3):591-620.
Judith Shklar, Bernard Williams and political realism.Katrina Forrester - 2012 - European Journal of Political Theory 11 (3):247-272.
Liberal legalism: Law, culture and identity.Shiraz Dossa - 1999 - The European Legacy 4 (3):73-87.
A liberal egalitarian paradox.Alexander W. Cappelen & Bertil Tungodden - 2006 - Economics and Philosophy 22 (3):393-408.

Analytics

Added to PP
2015-03-28

Downloads
35 (#395,891)

6 months
5 (#246,492)

Historical graph of downloads
How can I increase my downloads?

Author's Profile

Tiphaine Dickson
Portland State University

Citations of this work

No citations found.

Add more citations

References found in this work

No references found.

Add more references