Legal History Commons^™

Justice As Play, Jack L. Sammons

Mercer Law Review

I am interested here in using Johannes Huizinga's work on play, Homo Ludens, to explore a strange, yet civilizing, phenomenon. Why do we take those social disputes in our ordinary lives that often seem most serious and therefore most divisive, turn them over to playful participants in a legal game, and then choose, more or less, to call the outcome of this game justice and to trust it as such even to the point of preferring it to the political? Why, that is, do we think that it is justice that arises from this play?

This inquiry is not …