Legalism and Its Paradoxes in Judith Shklar’s Work

Abstract

This chapter begins by analyzing Judith Shklar's early book, Legalism. An Essay on Law, Morals and Politics, in which she distinguishes among aspects of legalism as ideology, as creative policy, and as an ethos of the law. Shklar was unable to explain how these various dimensions of legalism could be reconciled plausibly with one another. Furthermore, while her critique of criminal international law is being revived today in the name of a certain skepticism toward institutions of international law, this critique needs to be balanced against her full-throated defense of the legitimacy of the Nuremberg trials. The final part of this chapter presents the complicated relationship of law and politics in Hannah Arendt's and Shklar's works.