The front pages of our newspapers and the chatter on the blogs bear
witness to the divorce of law from justice. Highly paid lawyers
mine the law for loopholes to help Fortune 500 corporations legally
evade their taxes and spoil the environment. In a world governed by
the rule of law, justice, it seems, is a chimera, an abstraction,
and thus a distraction from the real world struggle over political
interest. Ought we, then, to abandon talk about abstract ideals of
justice in favor of strategic and political arguments? In The Gift
of Science, a bold, revisionist account of 300 years of
jurisprudence, Roger Berkowitz argues that the idea of justice is
endangered and needs to be saved. Moving from the scientific
revolution to the rise of law and economics, Berkowitz tells the
story of how lawyers invented a science of law to preserve law's
claim to moral authority. The "gift" of science to law, however,
proved bittersweet. Instead of strengthening the bond between law
and justice, the subordination of law to science transformed law
from an ethical order into a tool for social and economic ends. The
Gift of Science is a mesmerizing and original intellectual history
of law. As a genealogy of the modern divorce of law from justice,
Berkowitz shows that positive law has its formative impulse not in
the English works of Thomas Hobbes and John Austin, but in the
German tradition of legal science stretching from Gottfried Wilhelm
Leibniz to Friedrich Carl von Savigny and Rudolf von Jhering. As a
contribution to jurisprudence, Berkowitz argues that positive law
is best understood as a product of science and not, as usually
thought, as the will of a sovereign. As a work of political theory,
Berkowitz explores how the subordination of law to social science
has hollowed out the ethical center of law as the institutional
embodiment of justice. Finally, the book makes manifest the danger
that the transformation of law itself into a product of science
poses for the possibility of law, justice, and freedom in the
modern age.
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