Law and Popular Justice

Paper Summary:

This paper explains that laws reflect, not universal, natural conditions, but particular cultural and social constructions. The author argues that one of the reasons that laws exist is to impose an artificial simplicity and order onto human behavior and human belief. The paper points out that, in a democracy, the law shifts from one era to the next, trying to reflect and create as great a consensus as is possible, but always leaving a large number of people outside of that consensus.

From the Paper:

"Let us take a recent example of this. Ira Einhorn, who had been convicted in absentia in 1993 of killing his girlfriend, had fled to France. When U.S. authorities determined that he was living in that country, they asked French officials to allow them to extradite Einhorn back to the United States when he could be retried and sentenced. Both France and the United States have as a part of their culture and their laws a prohibition against murder. However, in France, this prohibition against murder includes executions (which opponents often refer to as state-sanctioned murder). In the United States (at least at the federal level and in many of the states), the legal and cultural prohibition against murder does not include execution."

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