Sound Ideas and Absurd Consequences: Reflections of a Legal Historian

R. C. Van Caenegem

European Review, 2011, vol. 19, issue 1, 93-104

Abstract: During the 60 years that I have been writing – and speculating – on public law (my first book on medieval criminal law came out in 1954), I have been repeatedly struck by a particular phenomenon to which I would now like to draw attention: that sound ideas and useful innovations eventually – when relentlessly taken to their extreme consequences and pushed along the abstract lines of their inner logic – lead to absurd or even nefarious results, defeating the original intention.

Date: 2011
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