The Legal Junction: the complex promise of modern legal professionalism

“The language – and therefore also to some large degree the practice – of morality today is in great disorder,”1 Alasdair MacIntyre writes, and as long as our moral world is diverse and pluralistic, the confusion will not be easily overcome. Indeed, the legal world is daily confronted with conflicts that result at least in part from the moral confusion that has become our modern fate. Legal institutions and practices are inevitably involved in all sorts of struggles because they have an important function in dealing with conflict as a basic fact of life. We may even say, with Stuart Hampshire, that justice is conflict and that the law mitigates and transforms conflicts such that they need not escalate into uncontrollable violence and can somehow be settled or otherwise discharged.2 Indeed, legal professionals daily live and work in a world of confusion and conflict; dealing with conflict is what they specialize in and thus we might think of them as “connoisseurs of order” in a society that constantly threatens to disintegrate into chaos and disorder.