Law and Justice: An Introduction to Social Theory

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Law and JusticeAn Introduction to Social Theory

• LSJ/SIS 362
• Prof. Angelina Snodgrass Godoy
• Autumn 2007

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What is law?

• a set of rules/norms/standards
• a moral arbiter
• a way to solve problems
• a way to govern society in orderly fashion

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• What is the connection between law and justice?

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Source Racial Disparities in Federal Death
Penalty Prosecutions 1988-1994Staff Report by
the Subcommittee on Civil and Constitutional
RightsCommittee on the JudiciaryOne Hundred
Third Congress, Second Session
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Economic justice?
Ratio of average worker pay to average CEO pay
Source Business Week
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Law and Justice

• If justice is blind (equal to all), how do we
  make sense of the injustices around us? Do we
  need more law? Better law?
• Much of the practice of law is based on the
  presumption that law justice
• The field of law and society studies examines the
  interaction between the law and social
  institutions

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Law and Society studies

• To understand the law, need sometimes to look
  outside the law
• Empirical studies
• Theoretical studies
• In this class, we will read every thinker to
  examine one question what is the relationship
  between law and justice?

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Where were headed course overview

• Liberalism (Locke, J.S. Mill)
• Ideally, law protects individual freedoms
• law is justice
• law should not go beyond its limited role of
  protecting individual freedoms to reorder society
  toward some imagined idea of the good

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Where were headed course overview

• Marxism (Marx, Engels, Gramsci)
• Law is an instrument of class domination
• Law (in a capitalist society) is injustice

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Where were headed course overview

• Critical race theory/critical feminist theory
• Not only class domination, but also racial and
  gender domination, are perpetuated through laws
• Liberal law is gendered, is raced
• At the same time, laws can be written in such a
  way as to actively remedy the injustices by
  addressing structures of inequality in society

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Where were headed course overview

• Poststructuralist theory (Foucault)
• Law is neither justice nor injustice, but another
  reflection of the connections between power and
  knowledge that constrain us, that shape who we
  are
• There is no escape from the house of power, no
  liberal self outside the law we are defined,
  produced by the norms that govern us