On 7th March 2014 at 14.00 h Iris van Domselaar will defend her doctoral thesis ‘The Fragility of Rightness. Adjudication and the primacy of practice’ . The ceremony will take place at the University of Amsterdam (Faculty of Law, Agnietenkapel). The thesis contains a legal philosphical research to the moral quality of adjudication.
Synopsis
The Fragility of Rightness. Adjudication and the Primacy of Practice
This thesis develops a philosophical approach to moral quality of adjudication. The argument pursued has a critical and a constructive side. It firstly offers a critique on accounts of adjudication that rely on normative moral theory and their soothing ways of coming to grips with adjudication’s (troublesome) phenomenology. It subsequently offers an understanding of moral quality in adjudication that does not rely on normative moral theory, but rather gives primacy to its practice. This understanding is ‘the fragility of rightness’.
The ‘fragility of rightness’ is constituted by three interrelated elements: a virtue-ethical conception of judicial decision-making, the concept of civic friendship and the concept of a tragic legal choice. By virtue of these three elements it aims to account for the moral quality of adjudication and at the same time be responsive to its (troublesome) phenomenology. It presents adjudication as a potentially moral practice that is inescapably fragile, messy and genuinely disturbing, which as a consequence is destabilizing for the legal order as a whole, for individual judges, as well as for the losing citizen(s) concerned. It goes without saying that this approach is tentative. The goal of this thesis is to advance our understanding of the moral character of adjudication, not to have the last word.
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