Theorizing Legal Needs: Towards a Caring Legal System Benjamin Miller A thesis submitted to the Faculty of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the MA degree in Political Science School of Political Studies Faculty of Social Sciences University of Ottawa Ottawa, Canada 2016 2 Table of Contents Table of Contents Abstract...................................................................................................................................... 5 Acknowledgements .................................................................................................................... 6 Introduction ................................................................................................................................ 7 The Ethics of Care: An Introduction ........................................................................................ 8 Plan of the Work ....................................................................................................................11 Method & Conceptual Framework .........................................................................................12 Practical Value ......................................................................................................................15 Prima Facie Issues ................................................................................................................15 Chapter 1: Legal Needs ............................................................................................................18 Definition ...............................................................................................................................18 Criticisms ...............................................................................................................................24 Chapter 2: What is A Normative Need? ....................................................................................30 Non-Normative need .............................................................................................................31 Normative Need ....................................................................................................................32 Serious Harm ........................................................................................................................33 Acquired Needs and the Problem of True and False Needs ..................................................34 The Paradox of Universality and Particularity ........................................................................35 Occurrent and Dispositional Needs .......................................................................................36 Summary of Need Thus Far ..................................................................................................37 What do we need?.................................................................................................................38 Chapter 3: Needing Needs ........................................................................................................45 Unique Advantages of Needs ................................................................................................46 Criticisms of Needs................................................................................................................49 Rights, Preferences, and Their Limits ....................................................................................53 Limitations and Conclusion ....................................................................................................56 Chapter 4: What Makes a Need Legal?.....................................................................................57 Method of the chapter ............................................................................................................58 Limitations .............................................................................................................................59 Self-Help and ADR in Brief ....................................................................................................60 Categorical Limitations of Self-Help and ADR ........................................................................61 3 Political Action .......................................................................................................................63 What needs does this serve? ................................................................................................66 Normative and Positive Legal Needs .....................................................................................68 Conclusion ............................................................................................................................69 Chapter 5: Reconceptualizing Legal Needs ..............................................................................70 Revised Definition .................................................................................................................70 Solutions to Chapter 1’s Problems .........................................................................................73 Major Criticisms of the Renewed Conception ........................................................................78 Chapter 6: Can Institutions Care? .............................................................................................83 Conceptions of Care ..............................................................................................................83 Is Institutional Care Possible? ...............................................................................................89 Is Institutional Care Desirable? ..............................................................................................92 When is Institutional Care Needed? ......................................................................................95 Conclusion ............................................................................................................................97 Chapter 7: Care Ethics and the Law ........................................................................................ 100 Relational Feminism ............................................................................................................ 100 Caring Lawyering ................................................................................................................ 102 Abortion Rights .................................................................................................................... 105 Objections to Relational Feminism ...................................................................................... 108 Conclusion .......................................................................................................................... 111 Chapter 8: Caring Legal System ............................................................................................. 113 Limits of the Relational Feminist Proposals ......................................................................... 113 An Attentive Legal System ................................................................................................... 115 A Responsible Legal System ............................................................................................... 118 A Competent Legal System ................................................................................................. 120 Responding to the Legal System ......................................................................................... 122 Conclusion .......................................................................................................................... 123 Conclusion .............................................................................................................................. 126 Taking Stock........................................................................................................................ 126 Objections to this Project as a Whole .................................................................................. 128 Other Limitations ................................................................................................................. 131 Next Steps ........................................................................................................................... 132 Bibliography ............................................................................................................................ 134 4 Abstract Care ethics is primarily about responding to needs. Yet, surprisingly, attempts to apply the ethics of care in the domain of law have paid almost no attention to the concept of legal needs. This study fills that gap by systematically defining legal needs. It does this by revising current understandings of legal need through a unified conceptual framework for the philosophy of needs and a comparative analysis of legal action, and its major alternatives in dispute resolution and prevention. The conception of legal need that results is both more sensitive to preventative functions of the law and opens the door to a much wider range of policy options beyond legal aid. Legal needs are found to be a special case of institutional needs, i.e. needs that cannot be satisfied without an institution. I argue that the existence of institutional needs means institutions, rather than any particular actor within them, can be caregivers, but not all conceptions of the ethics of care