Jill Stauffer. “The Rule of Law and its Shadow: Ambivalence, Procedure, and the Justice Beyond Legality.” Law, Culture and the Humanities, vol. 3, no. 2 (2007): 225–243.
This article challenges the traditional liberal legal subject as fully autonomous and self-sufficient, proposing instead a reimagined legal actor who carries inherent, unchosen ethical responsibilities toward others. Drawing on Emmanuel Levinas, it explores the inherent tension in liberal rule of law theory: that sometimes achieving true justice requires transgressing strict legality. This ambivalence is especially pressing in contexts like international humanitarian intervention, where lawyers and legal institutions must navigate the delicate balance between ethics and politics. In backsliding democracies, attorneys embody this tension as they strive to uphold justice beyond mere legal formalism, confronting the ethical responsibilities that liberalism’s conventional subject often overlooks. Their role is thus to act as guardians of justice in a legal order fraught with moral ambiguity and political pressure.