Justice as Message: Expressivist Foundations of International Criminal Justice / by Carsten Stahn
2020 eBook of the Week #32
9780198864189
Oxford University Press, 2020
Accessible via Oxford Scholarship Online
International criminal justice is a form of social performance. It relies on messages, speech acts, and performatives practices in order to convey social meaning. Major criminal proceedings, such as Nuremberg or Tokyo and other post-Second World War trials have been branded as ‘spectacles of didactic legality’. However, the expressive and the communicative functions of law have been sidelined in institutional discourse and legal practice. The concept of expressivism is referred to in justifications of punishment or sentencing rationales. It appears as reference in scholarly treatises, but it has remained crucially underdeveloped. This book is an attempt to remedy this gap. It shows that expression and communication are not only an inherent part of the punitive functions of international criminal justice but represented in a whole spectrum of practices: norm expression and diffusion, institutional actions, performative aspects of criminal procedures, and repair of harm. It argues that expressivism is not a classical justification of justice or punishment on its own but rather a means to understand its aspirations and limitations, to explain how justice is produced, and to ground punishment rationales.
