Law, Ethics and the Office of the Jurist

The genealogy of legal office is pieced together here to rediscover the scope and ambition of a role that has been largely lost to conscious self-reflection. Organized around a concern with the inheritance of juristic traditions, institutions, and forms of life, the contributors to this book take up the question of how a jurist might learn to live, or die, with law. The collection invites readers to reconsider fundamental questions: What responsibilities accompany the jurist’s role? How do different traditions conceptualize the ethical obligations of legal interpretation? What happens when established norms face modern challenges? By reconstructing the genealogy of legal office across diverse traditions, the contributors recover aspects of juridical identity that have faded from contemporary awareness.

Law, Ethics, and the Office of the Jurist will appeal to legal scholars, practitioners, and students, as well as those in adjacent fields concerned with professional ethics, institutional history, and the evolving relationship between law and society in our complex global landscape.

Peter Goodrich, Professor of Law at Cardozo School of Law, and Visiting Professor in Social Science at NYU Abu Dhabi, he is an ardent advocate of argute alliterations and the habile silent ’p’, as in raspberry and psittacist, ptomaine and rhubarb. Peter perturbs the Panglossian portals and protocols of panomian legalities and other plagiarisms with the pataphysical portents of posthuman sciences and their paromion postulates. A practitioner of widdershins in the circulus disciplinarum, he is author, recently and most compositely, of Advanced Introduction to Law and Literature (Edward Elgar) and of Judicial Uses of Images: Vision in Decision (Oxford University Press), and also co-edited Performing Law (Cambridge University Press).

Shaun McVeigh is Professor of Law at University of Melbourne School of Law. His current work is on the continuing influence of colonial legal inheritance and lawful existence in the South.