The Politics of Lawyers and the Rule of Law: Review Essay of Abel’s Law’s Wars and Law’s Trials (original) (raw)

There are defining moments in the trajectory of a nation-state. A civil war, an economic depression, an ethnic cleansing, an uprising, a war, a wave of xenophobia, civil unrest, a spike of intolerance. There are also decisive moments in the career of a scholar. A point of academic entry, an influential mentor, a creative collaborator, a revisionist opening, an orchestration of peers, a breakthrough idea, the discovery and exploration of new data, a moral cry. On occasion these two coincide—the crisis for the state stimulates the boldness and creativity of a notable scholar in ways that promise both sober reflection on the pathologies of the past and thoughtful imagination about adaptations for the future. Law’s Wars (LW) and Law’s Trials (LT) instantiate such a conjunction. Terrorism, once remote from US shores and the travail of a Northern Ireland or Italy, thrust itself upon US territory and the American imagination in a single shattering day. At that moment it also put the US, its legal system and military, its politics and people to the test. How would one of its most hallowed institutions, the system of justice, and its moral banner, the rule of law, respond when put to an ultimate test? What resilience, what adaptability, what fidelity to moral ideals would be revealed when forces of public rage and fear, when incipient racial and religious prejudices, would crash upon the shores of in-built fragilities in institutions of law and government and the delicate fabric of civil society and public discourse?