Philosophy & Law

Our lives don’t just play out over time: we lead them over the course of that time, shaping them as an extended whole, remembering and reacting to the past, anticipating, planning and creating the future....

Does anything matter if we’re done for? We are not the first to wonder. Contemporary fictions are preoccupied with apocalypse, human extinction and cataclysm, but this is nothing new. Secular eschatology...

Schopenhauer has long held the title of gloomiest philosopher in history. He sees human existence not as grand tragedy but squalid farce, with men and women writhing in the grip of appetites that are both...

The​ rape kit is a cardboard box containing ordinary items anyone might own: envelopes, combs, swabs, nail clippers. But the packaging together of these things in Chicago in the 1970s enabled the standardisation...

God’s existence could be proved, Moses Maimonides thought, regardless of what we conclude about the eternity of the universe. If the universe isn’t eternal, then God must exist, because God is the...

New linguistic articulations can reconfigure the way we make sense of our own feelings, thoughts and responses – our internalised self-interpretations. And what is true of our most basic feelings and...

The Supreme Court is quietly editing the Human Rights Act out of existence. None of this is being done in secret – the judgments are public – but the changes have barely registered. Judges, whether...

In this country, trial by jury is constitutive of a fair, credible, legitimate system of criminal justice. It is what gives legitimacy to the state’s extensive powers of coercion over wrongdoers. At...

With the proscription of Palestine Action early in July, the question of what support for a terrorist group means has become urgent. Very few people in Britain supported al-Qaida; many more support the...

The trials of Constance Marten and Mark Gordon were held to determine their criminal responsibility for their daughter’s death, not larger moral questions. And since the precise cause of death was impossible...

I believe there is a moral case for disarming the machinery of war that is killing innocent civilians in Gaza with the complicity of the British government. I believe that damaging and destroying weapons...

Francis’s continual emphasis on mercy – ‘the first attribute of God’ – explains his papal choices more clearly than the progressive/conservative heuristic. It is the reason he wanted a church...

When I told people I was going to Guantánamo Bay last September to observe the trial of the 9/11 hijackers, I was met with bemusement. Even the lawyers I spoke to seemed surprised that there were still...

When diversity, equity and inclusion become ‘threats’ to the order of society, progressive politics in general is held responsible for every social ill. The result, as we have seen in recent years,...

Marx meant Capital to read as if it were a pedagogical exercise in dispelling illusion, penetrating the veil that bourgeois economists had draped over a system that depends on the exploitation of labour...

On the horizon is a legally unfettered behemoth capable of coercing organisations, negating rights, suppressing speech and reshaping the economy and society of the United States – all at the whim of...

In the summer ​of 1860, an unprecedented wave of sectarian violence swept across Greater Syria. The massacre has long been studied but its causes remain misunderstood. Muslims, Jews and Christians of...

Christ himself made barely any pronouncements condemning sexuality. This has not stood in the way of Church authorities' lavish condemnation of all sorts of human desire.