Law's mistakes

Wrongful convictions and botched executions sit alongside a improperly admitted piece of evidence and a misunderstanding during contract drafting as examples of how much of law is shaped by error. Some mistakes are simply departures from accepted practice, while others follow from deliberate choices that backfire. Law may respond by correcting them or may treat them as an unavoidable price of acting at all. Certain errors originate outside the legal system, such as flaws in a deal between private parties, while others come from officials doing their jobs, like a police officer who searches without a warrant that was required.

The essays in this collection ask what legal systems count as errors and how they react. They trace the legal theories and political commitments behind competing views of what qualifies as a mistake, and they look closely at the difficult, disputed, and changing connection between law and error. The contributors also propose ways of reading mistakes for what they show about law's goals and its boundaries, and for how the idea of law is formed by its contrast with the category of mistake.

The volume brings together its editors with Paul Schiff Berman, Sonali Chakravarti, Jody L. Medeira, Stewart Motha, Kunal Parker, and Jordan Steiker.