Freedom and Responsibility. Readings in Philosophy and Law

Ratio Juris, 1991

Catholic University of America Press eBooks, 2019

1970

Ratio Juris, 2009

's extensive and impressive book, The Law and the Right: A Reappraisal of the Reality That Ought to Be (Pattaro 2005a) (now available in a paperback edition: Pattaro 2007) serves as both an introduction to the multi-volume Treatise of Legal Philosophy and General Jurisprudence (Pattaro 2005b), and as a self-standing examination of an important jurisprudential subject. As an introduction, the volume explains the intellectual background and aims of the Treatise and provides an overview and brief commentary on the themes developed in the later volumes. Ideas contained in the main text of the book are also indicatively related to those to be encountered in later parts of the Treatise. The present review will however focus upon the book's second, and main, purpose in advancing its own distinctive set of theories. The book falls conveniently into four parts. The first examines the idea * I am grateful to Sylvie Delacroix and Enrico Pattaro for their comments on a previous version of this essay. Any remaining errors are my own.

1959

Law: Natural, Artificial and Unnatural , 2022

There are numerous felt needs, emotional, psychological, economic, equitable treatment in various fora or spheres of common (meaning interpersonal and collective spaces) life, to name the most obvious, that systems of “justice” and consequently of “law” are invoked to address. Demands on such systems, assuming these demands are not intentionally malafide or exploitative or abusive, range from that of vengeance and retribution to restoration, restitution and rehabilitation. The systems upon which such demands are made, with vastly varying degrees of expectation of fulfilment, and perhaps an even vaster array of protocols required to invoke judgement or resolution of some sort, likewise range from supernatural, moral and religious structures and apparatus extant to Global or International Instruments of Conventions and Treaties, with their own apparatus and structures all the way through “national” or “sub-national” systems, to “customary” or “traditional” practice, many of these last as diverse, contradictory, complex, even disguised as extrusions of a larger protocol, such as the “larger” systems of justice or even merely of ordinary, everyday life, the “normalcy” of mundane social interactions and transactions within which they are embedded. All these are of course, constantly mutating whether primarily in response to each other or to experienced situations and few, if any, provide unalloyed satisfaction. Certainly not for any appreciable duration. Rarely, if ever, is there a Permanent Resolution. Indeed, the array of caveats and exceptional or innovative resolutions, morphing into new legal trajectories of society have resulted in most formal bodies of law becoming unwieldy, fragmented, esoteric and inaccessible

American Journal of International Law, 1986