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In this follow-up to Law and the Beautiful Soul, Alan Norrie addresses the split between legal and ethical judgment. Shaped by history, law’s formalism both eschew and requires ethics.

The first essays consider legal form in its practical aspect, and the ethical problems encountered (‘law’s architectonic’). The later essays look at the complex underlying relation between law and ethic (‘law’s constellation’). In Hegel’s philosophy, legal and ethical judgment are brought together in a rational totality. Here, the synthesis remains unachieved, the dialectic systematically ‘broken’.

These essays cover such issues as criminal law’s ‘general part’, homicide reform, self-defence, euthanasia and war guilt. They interrogate legal problems, consider law’s method and its place in the social whole. The analysis of law’s historicity, its formalism and its relation to ethics contributes importantly to central questions in law, legal theory and criminal justice.

Colleagues from the Psychology department will present their research at the biennial conference of the Society for Applied Memory in Research and Cognition in Sydney in January 2017 (). Here are the posters they will be presenting:

In a study on false memories, Dr Kimberley Wade in the Department of Psychology demonstrates that if we are told about a completely fictitious event from our lives, and repeatedly imagine that event occurring, almost half of us would accept that it did.

Over 400 participants in ‘memory implantation’ studies had fictitious autobiographical events suggested to them - and it was found that around 50% of the participants believed, to some degree, that they had experienced those events.

The study has been reported in the international press:  

Prof Jackie Hodgson and Asher Flynn from Monash have a new edited collection on 'Access to Justice and Legal Aid: Comparative Perspectives on Unmet Legal Need' published by Hart.

This book considers how access to justice is affected by restrictions to legal aid budgets and increasingly prescriptive service guidelines.

As common law jurisdictions, England and Wales, and Australia, share similar ideals, policies and practices, but they differ in aspects of their legal and political culture, in the nature of the communities they serve and in their approaches to providing access to justice. These jurisdictions thus provide us with different perspectives on what constitutes justice and how we might seek to overcome the burgeoning crisis in unmet legal need.

The book fills an important gap in existing scholarship as the first to bring together new empirical and theoretical knowledge examining different responses to legal aid crises both in the domestic and comparative contexts, across criminal, civil and family law. It achieves this by examining the broader social, political, legal, health and welfare impacts of legal aid cuts and prescriptive service guidelines. Across both jurisdictions, this work suggests that it is the most vulnerable groups who lose out in the way that law is now done in the 21st century.

The book is essential reading for all those interested in access to justice and legal aid.

CJC member Anastasia Chamberlen wrote a short piece for The Conversation on prisoner wellbeing last week. Anastasia's article is entitled and refers to her own ongoing research with women prisoners.

It will also be published in the newspaper (prisoners’ national newspaper) in January.