Mercy is an essential component of the architecture of justice. That’s the claim in Benjamin Berger’s chapter, “Poetry, Mercy, and the Phenomenology of Justice”.

Ben’s chapter, which is a readable introduction to his work, lands on the experience of justice. In this chapter, Ben teases out how to bridge the messiness of life with the legal and philosophical contours of justice. He uses the narrative of Jonah as a foil to reveal the role that mercy plays, or at least might play, in our understanding of justice. Ben’s argument is most clearly stated when he concludes that the reading of the Book of Jonah offered by his chapter “one in which the analogy between the judgment of Nineveh and the plant have poetic pride of place, offers an interpretation of this aphorism faithful to the central themes and preoccupations of the book: to commit to abstract judgment alone is folly; and doing so estranges one from the virtue of mercy, with its unsettling but vital demand to connect one’s sense of justice with the perplexities of lived experience”.

Ben Berger’s work spans criminal and constitutional law and theory, law and religion, and the law of evidence. He makes a major contribution as the editor in chief of the CJLS.