The Unforgotten: Memories of Justice

W. James Booth

American Political Science Review, 2001, vol. 95, issue 4, 777-791

Abstract: Justice is, in part, a form of remembrance: Memory occupies a vital place at the heart of justice and its struggle to keep the victims, crimes, and perpetrators among the unforgotten. I argue that this memory-justice at once informs core judicial practices and ranges beyond them in a manner that leaves judicial closure incomplete. It reminds us of a duty to keep crimes and their victims from the oblivion of forgetting, of a duty to restore, preserve, and acknowledge the just order of the world. Yet, in the shadow of remembrance, other human goods can wither, goods located in the temporal registers of present and future. This latter lesson is important, but it is one with which we are familiar. I emphasize another, with which we are perhaps less at home: the intimacy of memory's bond with justice, not as obsessional or as a syndrome, but as a face of justice itself.

Date: 2001
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