Judgment and Recognition in Law

Justice begins in the fragments. While the legal system excels at classification and resolution, it often fails at recognition. Written from the bench by an Irish High Court judge, this book challenges the administrative sublime of modern bureaucracy, which sees persons too often converted into risk scores and bullet points.

Blending lived judicial experience with queer theory, literature, and philosophy, this book proposes a jurisprudence of attentive refusal to let the human disappear into procedural fluency. From piccolo paeans to global postage stamps to reflections on the moral motion of the soul, this book redefines the judge’s task as being not just to decide, but to listen for the stutter and the shimmer that the official record can forget. Structured as a reflective journey across hemispheres – from the Global North to the Global South and back to Ireland – the book weaves the thoughts of various thinkers, from Aquinas and Baldwin to Butler and Muñoz, into a form of lyrical jurisprudence. Reflecting on the inner life of judging, that is to say the moral and imaginative dimensions of law as they unfold in attention, silence, and refusal, the book offers a companion to legal practice that invites readers to think again about what it means to judge, to recognise, and to stay near the lives that law touches. Judgment, it maintains, is not mere decision but an act of ethical attention, a form of seeing that keeps the human in view.

This book will appeal to academics and advanced students in the areas of jurisprudence, legal theory, ethics, and law-and-literature, as well as others with an interest in the ethics and practice of legal judgment.