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5 - Supreme emergency

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 April 2013

Nicholas Rengger
Affiliation:
University of St Andrews, Scotland
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Summary

  1. Listen to what they did.

  2. Don't listen to what they said.

  3. What was written in blood

  4. Has been set up in lead.

  1. Lead tears the heart.

  2. Lead tears the brain.

  3. What was written in blood

  4. Has been set up again.

  1. The heart is a drum.

  2. The drum has a snare.

  3. The snare is in the blood.

  4. The blood is in the air.

  1. Listen to what they did.

  2. Listen to what's to come.

  3. Listen to the blood.

  4. Listen to the drum.

  5. James Fenton, ‘Blood and Lead’

In 1977, H.L.A. Hart published an essay in the Georgia Law Review. ‘The Nightmare and the Noble Dream’ essayed a characteristically brilliant interpretation of twentieth-century American legal theory suggesting that the whole body of United States jurisprudence was focused on the question of how to respond to the reality of judges striking down democratically validated legislation on constitutional grounds. One response – the nightmare – was to assert versions of a totally unconstrained indeterminacy in law, a position adopted in varying ways and to varying degrees, Hart thought, by the early twentieth-century American legal realists, by Deweyesque pragmatists and, more recently, by the critical legal studies movement. The leading alternative – the noble dream – assumed a complete legal determinacy, with resources being found within law for a consistent set of legal principles informing judges' decisions and, indeed, the law itself. Among the leading representatives of this view, Hart thought, were Roscoe Pound (and, one might add, though Hart did not, Lon Fuller), but the chief contemporary representative – and Hart's chief target in the essay – was the judicial prescriptivism of Ronald Dworkin.

Type
Chapter
Information
Just War and International Order
The Uncivil Condition in World Politics
, pp. 134 - 157
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2013

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References

Lacey's, Nicola excellent biography The Life of H.L.A. Hart: The Nightmare and the Noble Dream (Oxford University Press, 2006)
Robin's, Corey excellent Fear: The History of a Political Idea (Oxford University Press, 2004)

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  • Supreme emergency
  • Nicholas Rengger, University of St Andrews, Scotland
  • Book: Just War and International Order
  • Online publication: 05 April 2013
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139382670.007
Available formats
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  • Supreme emergency
  • Nicholas Rengger, University of St Andrews, Scotland
  • Book: Just War and International Order
  • Online publication: 05 April 2013
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139382670.007
Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • Supreme emergency
  • Nicholas Rengger, University of St Andrews, Scotland
  • Book: Just War and International Order
  • Online publication: 05 April 2013
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139382670.007
Available formats
×