Does our legal system fail because it is based on flawed moral premises? On Monday, November 29, at 4:30 p.m., in Room 127, Thane Rosenbaum, author of The Myth of Moral Justice: Why Our Legal System Fails to Do What's Right, will lead a panel discussion on this topic. Commentators will be the Reverend Jerry Streets, Yale University Chaplain and Pastor of the Church of Christ in Yale, and Anthony T. Kronman, former Dean of YLS and Sterling Professor of Law. The talk is free and open to the public.
Thane Rosenbaum is a novelist, essayist and law professor who teaches human rights, legal humanities, and law and literature at Fordham Law School. In The Myth of Moral Justice, he offers a far reaching critique of the legal system based on moral terms, and finds the law often lacking. "When the legal system is working at its best legally, it fails often morally," he says.
Rosenbaum says his critique is often provocative, because it forces those in the legal system to think about that system in a new way. "I'm attacking the legal system even when it's doing legally correct things," he says. "But when it's doing legally correct things based on the procedures and mechanisms of the law, most people who are not lawyers walk away feeling resentful or bitter or ambivalent--even the winners. Why is that?"
Rosenbaum turns to the work of writers, filmmakers, and other artists to provide an outside perspective on the law. "They're always looking at it in moral and spiritual terms," he says. "Why is it when people watch movies like Erin Brockovich do the lawyers always come across as so morally obtuse that you need people like Erin Brockovich to teach the lawyers to be human?"
His talk will explore how the legal system can be made to better respect "basic questions of dignity and decency and respect--and basic distinctions between right and wrong." And he provides two quick examples of moral precepts the law often neglects: "You shouldn't try to crush the other side without mercy.... You should care about the truth."
Rosenbaum is also the author of the novels, The Golems of Gotham (2002) (San Francisco Chronicle Top 100 Book) and Second Hand Smoke, which was a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award in 1999. Rosenbaum is also the author of the novel-in-stories, Elijah Visible, which received the Edward Lewis Wallant Award in 1996 for the best book of Jewish-American fiction. His articles, reviews, and essays appear frequently in national publications.