Justifying Judgment

Many people submit to the law simply because they believe that the institutions administering it are just. But what if a law itself is unjust? The duty to obey law presupposes that laws are both consistent and just; because they sometimes aren't, appeals to a higher political morality become necessary if justice is to be served.Justifying Judgment reconsiders the relationship between legal and political philosophy, showing that the former is incomplete without the latter. Taking the writings of Alan Gewirth as a point of departure, Vincent Samar demonstrates the inherent incompleteness of conventional theories of law. He reviews the current state of legal and political theory and advances a metatheory for law that would enable judges to decide difficult cases by drawing upon the best available theory of politics appropriate to the case's level of abstraction.Samar challenges the current wisdom that social morality can resolve every legal conflict by questioning the very principle of our submission to law. He re-examines some difficult cases from American history -- Dred Scott, Brown v. Board of Education, Roe v. Wade, Romer v. Evans -- in order to demonstrate the difficulties inherent in the law and to show that no single theory of law will always preserve the balance between individual and collective justice.Every day, judges face difficult cases for which the law provides no firm precedents, or is even contradictory. Samar's work seeks to put justice back into law by encouraging law schools to train future judges to make decisions not by an internal analysis of the legal materials but by an appeal to the best ethical theory of politics so that they can face the intellectualchallenges involved in both clarifying concepts and justifying rights. By challenging conventional views of the law, it shows that our legal system might become more just rather than be merely procedurally correct.