The Sense of Justice

"One cannot expect Dubber to solve all the worlds problems in one small book. Yet it certainly provides a beginning for what could be enlightening investigations into justice." * Law and Politics Book Review * "Dubbers book is a considerable achievement: lucid, nuanced and a pleasure to read." -- Susan Bandes,editor of The Passions of Law "This is a timely, important and inspiring book. We live in a time when the rhetoric of war comes all too easily to the mouths and minds of penal policy-makers and politicians: we have the war against crime, the war against drugs, the war against terror; and offenders, those against whom such 'wars' are fought, are then liable to be portrayed as the enemyas outsiders whom we need not or cannot recognize as fellows. Dubber offers a powerful corrective to such moral myopia: the sense of justice, as 'the ability and willingness to recognize others as equal and rational persons and treat them as such.' Drawing on history, on law, philosophy and psychology, on a wide range of materials from both Europe and the United States, Dubber develops an account of the sense of justice as a matter of sense, or sensibility, rather than of abstract reason; but also as a matter of justice, rather than of more partial or limited empathya sense of justice that recognizes our moral fellowship with other human beings as moral agents. He goes on to show what a central role such an idea could play in structuring a decent system of criminal lawand thus in helping to motivate some of the profound reforms that our existing systems so urgently need." -- R. A. Duff,author of Punishment, Communication, and Community "Working with sources that span centuries, nations, and fields of thought, Dubber combines intellectual history with jurisprudential critique. . . . An important contribution not just to legal knowledge but to legal wisdom by suggesting the challenges and possibilities of reconciling the two sides of law's personality: rules and intuition, reason and emotion." -- Samuel H. Pillsbury,author of Judging Evil: Rethinking the Law of Murder and Manslaughter

Markus Dirk Dubber is Professor of Law at the University of Toronto. His many books include Victims in the War on Crime: The Use and Abuse of Victims Rights (NYU Press, 2002).

AcknowledgmentsIntroduction: The Signi?cance of the Sense of Justice 1 Uses and Abuses of the Sense of Justice 2 The Sense of Justice in Legal Thought 3 The Sense of Justice Misconceived 4 Rethinking the Sense of Justice 5 The Sense of Justice in Penal Law Conclusion: Law's Empathy NotesIndex About the Author