Christoph Kletzer (King's College London – The Dickson Poon School of Law) has posted Justice and Force (Sanctions: An Essential Element of Law?, edited by Nicoletta Bersier, Christoph Bezemek, Frederick Schauer (New York: Springer, 2025)) on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
This paper defends the claim that the law does not only attempt to solve the coordination problem of the use of force, rather it solves all co-ordination problems by means of solving the co-ordination problem of the use of force. The underlying claim is the following: to settle disagreement and solve co-ordination problems, people cannot but utter claims about what they believe they are permitted to do, utterances which come in the form of claims of justice. However, in the absence of the positive law as addressee of such claims, uttering claims of justice must be understood as holding out the prospect of the use of force and thus must be qualified as threats or inherently belligerent acts. To make claims of justice non-belligerent, they have to be addressed at the positive law, which in turn has to be understood as a system that permits the use of force. Or, put differently, since any claim of justice is inherently a claim about the permissibility of the use of force, any claim of justice must, in order to be itself justified, be directed at the law and not at everyone. To fulfil the function of civilising claims of justice and turning them into non-bellicose acts, the law has to be understood as essentially a system that permits the use of force.
Highly recommended.