Suchergebnisse

As an ambition to stress the construction of an external and an internal dimension within law I have chosen to study the non-pecuniary damages to victims of crime. The foundation for these damages came from the deep structure of law about the idea that the right to integrity of the human body and soul are one of the corner- stones in the state governed by law. But when it comes to estimating the amount, such that it gives the violated victim satisfaction and eventuality a preventive role, the application of the law becomes dependent on the knowledge about the external and the social norms that the law operates within. Compared with pecuniary or physical damages there are no formal norms from which we can appreciate that kind of damages we called non-pecuniary. This problem would maybe not become a big deal if the matter was not that the loss here is of a normative art and about "ought" related to human rights and the fact that individuals are carriers of these values. If the legal field stresses the closeness of the legal system that gives to a limited space for the possibility of discretion and reason and that undermines both the legitimacy of the law and the right to integrity. But if the external view and the possibility to interpret and create the content of the general sense of justice becomes to wide within the application of the law that will undermine and stress the professionalism of the legal profession but also central goals like predictable decisions. So the challenge is to find the balance that corresponds to the social norms within society and to generate knowledge about how people react upon the practise when it comes to the amount of damages. Therefore the topic is an example of how empirical facts about the social and political contexts become an important variable within the internal application of the law and how this creates an arena for socio-legal research and in a wider sense a debate about the role of legal decisions within a landscape of existential words like violations, satisfaction or human dignity. My method is both quantitative and qualitative and the aim is to provide both empirical knowledge about the general sense of the compensation to victims of crimes and an understanding of the impression in everyday life especially for victims of crimes through focusgroups.

The traditional restrictive attitude towards claim for compensation about non-pecuniary harms in both cause law and legislation become weaker even if the theoretically and practically reason behind the old exception-construction remain. This reason can best be explained by the thesis about incommensurability when it comes to compensate for some losses that money cannot compensate. To explain why the exception-construction is problemized in recent days I think two circumstances has played an important role (1) the materialisation of human rights as a consequence of the incorporation of the European Convention on Human Rights in Sweden since 1995 and (2) the right to crime victim compensation and the establishing of victimology in the legal and academic field. In practice there is of course a co-operation between these two factors and there is also some kind of hybrids like the legal interest of for example discrimination. This tendency is in my opinion therefore a practical and concrete example of law and justice in the risk society where almost every person is a potential victim of crimes and discrimination or other violations. In the risk society, given Ulrich Beck's definition, it is characteristic that these phenomenons in our society rub out the boarders between law and politics in the manifestation of reflexive subpolitics about flexibility. The possibility to obtain redress with this compensation function as a mean to support the judicial systems official goal that is to satisfied the citizens needs and at the same time secure the confidence and the legitimacy for the judicial system through the factors (1) legal security and (2) the legal rights of the individual. At the same time these compensations bring on inherent risks because of its unclear function and the incommensurability between injury and compensation that risks fall upon both the victims and the lawyer's profession. So when human rights now is both a goal and a mean for democracy and violations of the citizens bring about a right to compensation this illustrate a paradox. The judicial system cannot handle this type of injury that has it is ground in public law without challenge traditional principles and the legal professionalism. This tendency is also interesting in a comparative perspective given the premise that the jurisprudence movement known as Scandinavian Legal Realism has had an influence on the Swedish judicial culture. This follows from two circumstances: (1) Given the Scandinavian Legal Realism it is impossible to set up a legal claim from a violation of justice or somebody's rights and (2) even if it would be possible, it is impossible to imagine the basis of calculation of these compensation because there is no way for informal norms from the society to influence the formal legal norms and the application of the law (only the opposite) given the Scandinavian Legal Realism. The last circumstance is relevant because the compensation of non-pecuniary harms consist of incommensurability and the only way to calculate these compensation, so it make it serves as rectification or redress for the victim, is in reflection and influence of the informal norms or the "common sense of justice". My topic presupposes that the legal field is influenced by the theory in jurisprudence and can we therefore talk about an idealistic tendency or "critical legal realist" movement that maybe illustrates in these compensations. In a more concrete perspective these compensations bring to the fore methodological question in social science of how we can get empirically knowledge about norms in our society.