Splitting Selves: Morality and the Law

-- By CarolineFerrisWhite - 17 Feb 2010

Justice Douglas writes that "the rule of law..., evenly applied to minorities as well as majorities, to the poor as well as the rich, is the great mucilage that holds society together." Oliver Wendell Holmes, even in denying the mapping of law onto morality, comforts us with the thought that "the law is the witness and external deposit of our moral life." Douglas speaks of binding together of disparate selves through the law. Holmes, in pointing to the externalization of our collective moral conscience, suggests a separation of the self through the law. T. Each vision is lovely. Each speaks to one man’s dream of the law. And each statement is a clean and hopeful gloss on a system that is anything but. The law does not reliably mete out punishments to the bad and absolve the good of blame; the justice we arrive at is, at best, rough and approximate. What costs have we incurred in locating morality outside of ourselves, rather than within, and placing it in an unreliable and often unpredictable system that nonetheless binds us all?

Gil Cornblum Jumped off a Bridge

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Subsection B

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Justice Black writes that "[b]ad men, like good men, are entitled to be tried and sentenced in accordance with the law."

Section II

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