On Tragic Legal Choices

In this article the concept of the tragic legal choice is established as an indispensable complement to our theoretical understanding of adjudication. Tragic legal cases are part of everyday adjudication (albeit of course not necessarily part of the everyday experience of each and every judge). In such cases, adjudication will engender a sense of tragic loss, incommensurability, messiness, which cannot be avoided, overcome, or dismantled by means of legal reasoning as a pre-reflective or extra-legal illusion. In this sense, this article is a harbinger of ‘bad news’ for law and adjudication. Throughout the argument a variety of legal cases will be discussed in an attempt to bring some of this phenomenology to the fore, and also as a means of fostering the reader’s sense of the tragic.