The Right to Do Wrong: Morality and The Limits of Law Mark Osiel, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 2019, 502 pp (hardback £36.95) ISBN: 978-0-674-36825-5

The Right to Do Wrong: Morality and The Limits of Law Mark Osiel Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 2019, 502 pp (hardback £36.95) ISBN: 978-0-674-36825-5

Any legal or political observer today knows that the law cannot undertake everything necessary to moral ordering in modern society and that it requires informal supplement at many points by concepts as diverse and socially complex as dishonour, shame, disrepute, reproach, disgrace, opprobrium, humiliation and stigma – to name but a few. These non-legal sanctions can, for good or ill, assume a life of their own. Often they have constituted a society's first line of defence against ethical transgression. As the author of this volume puts it:

Shared understandings of right and wrong inevitably fail to find their way fully into law, but nonetheless assert themselves – at observable points, in recognisable ways – when we seek to put our entitlements to use and encounter others who believe we act improperly. Ethical considerations barred from entering law's front door thus frequently sneak in through the back, influencing our conduct no less for the seeming circuity … Legal rights to do serious wrong, and the routine resistance against their abusive exercise, occupy the decisive points where these forces meet, contend and are compelled to mutually accommodate. (p 321)

The author sounds a wise and timely note of caution to those ‘keen to enlist the law against perceived defects in common morality wherever we discern them’ (p 319).

Professor Mark Osiel of the University of Iowa's College of...