Abstract
Judicial obligation to enforce the law is typically regarded as both unproblematic and important: unproblematic because there is little reason to doubt that judges have a general, if prima facie, obligation to enforce law, and important because the obligation gives judges significant reason to limit their concern in adjudication to applying the law. I challenge both of these assumptions and argue that norms of political legitimacy, which may be extra-legal, are irretrievably at the basis of responsible judicial reasoning.
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Acknowledgements
I am grateful to David Lyons, Hugh Baxter, Simon Keller, Jamie Kelly, Timothy Brownlee and an anonymous reviewer for this journal for their careful review of earlier versions of this essay.
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Reeves, A.R. Do Judges Have an Obligation to Enforce the Law?: Moral Responsibility and Judicial-Reasoning. Law and Philos 29, 159–187 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10982-009-9061-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10982-009-9061-2