Law is the great concealer; and law is everywhere. Or so claimed Marxists once upon a time. Law] was imbricated within the mode of production and productive relations themselves . . . it intruded brusquely within alien categories, re-appearing bewigged and gowned in the form of ideology; . . . it was an arm of politics and politics was one of its arms; it was an academic discipline, subjected to the rigour of its own autonomous logic, it contributed to the definition of the self-identity of both the rulers 1 and the ruled. Does the old critique of domination still hold any sway? Apparently...

This book offers a series of essays by an international group of scholars whose work looks comparatively at law's attempts to deal with the past. Ranging from questions of criminal responsibility and amnesty to those of law's relation to time, memory, and the ethics of reconciliation, it is a sustained jurisprudential and philosophical analysis of one of the most important and pressing legal concerns of our time. Among its key concerns is that justice's demand on law has changed and, in the face of a divided and violent past, law is being called on to do the kind of work it ordinarily shuns....