Conclusion

Abstract

Abstract This brief conclusion presents a talmudic story that helps us situate different models of the courtroom and the process of judgment. The continuum of justice and judgment imagined by this story is contrary to one’s first instinct of what such a spectrum would look like. It draws a continuum of social justice and order by placing arbitrary violence at one end and compromise and generosity at the other, with the ‘rule of law’ presumably falling somewhere in between, neither wholly abhorrent nor wholly utopian. The conclusion then ties together the main book chapters, highlighting the similar and distinct ways the stories examined therein present a vision of courtroom justice as essentially continuous with the rest of the human and material world.