The Role of Law

What does law do for us? What is it supposed to do for us? We might think its main job is to decide conflict and make proclamations of right and wrong, and then maybe help us order our personal lives according to civil procedures such as marriage and will-making. Peter Fitzpatrick argues that law’s purpose is not so easy to pin down, and points out that theories of law are conspicuous in their collective inability to tell us what law is, and what it, definitively, is for.

Fitzpatrick, philosopher of law and author of The Mythology of Modern Law (Routledge, 1992) and Modernism and the Grounds of Law (Cambridge University Press, 2001) alongside countless articles and edited collections, prompts us to ask why, for instance, Nelson Mandela could despair of law under apartheid and yet view it as perhaps the only chance a black South African had to see justice done. In turn, how can the law giving Native Americans certain rights be the same as the law that so oppresses them? How—philosophically and factually—can law be the agent of so much justice and injustice at the same time? That and related questions are the subject of this interview.

Interview with Peter Fitzpatrick, Philosopher of the law in the Believer