LAW6154 - Democracy and Justice - 2024/25

In Western societies, we often assume that democratic government is necessary if legal norms and institutions are to claim legitimacy. Is that assumption correct? Do our democratic practices of legislation through public debate, individual freedoms, vibrant trade, powerful media and widespread litigation, inevitably promote justice? Do they ever undermine it? Does public participation play the constructive role often attributed to it? Does it promote the open, free society upon which law and justice are said to depend in a democracy? These problems are by no means recent in human history. They abounded in the democracy of ancient Athens, which pre-dated the industrial and electronic revolutions by more than two millennia. Such questions are examined with breathtaking rigour by the philosopher Plato, the West’s first systematic theorist of justice.