When Valerie Kerruish died in 2022, Critical Legal Thinking hosted a series of reflections from her former colleagues, friends, and collaborators. As recounted there, Valerie spent decades from the mid-1960s teaching law in Australia with an abiding concern for the dispossession of indigenous Australians and the unremitting violence they face. She then moved to Hamburg and founded, with Uwe Petersen and Matthias Kaiser, the Altonaer Stiftung für philosophische Grundlagenforschung. 

Val was my teacher, mentor, and friend. I can hardly imagine being an academic without her inspiring works and provocations.  Emilios Christodoulidis, a legal philosopher very dear to Val, observed on her passing that she was a perfectionist, and thus her magnum opus had remained ‘devastatingly unfinished’. Emilios, too, has now left us; his life cruelly cut short. His oeuvre is a vast array of books and articles, so we can continue thinking with him.

Val’s book that Emilios was referring to was published just over a year ago: The Wrong of Law: Metaphysics, Logics, and Law’s Claim of Right. Ed. Uwe Petersen (Routledge, 2025). We must be grateful to the extraordinary efforts of Uwe Petersen, Val’s partner and interlocutor, for his tireless labour of pulling the book together from a variety of drafts. For the publication, thanks are also due to Colin Perrin and Routledge for ensuring that future generations of legal philosophers will have access to this monumental study of law’s metaphysical, dialectical, and logical forms. 

This symposium on The Wrong of Law includes old and new readers of Val’s work. You will read responses from Esther Edelmann, Stephen Connelly, Bert van Roermund, Iaan Reynolds, and Tarik Kochi. In Val’s own words, the idea of the wrong of law is an “awkward idea” and an “elusive object”. So we must be grateful to the authors contributing to this symposium for helping us to access a challenging work of legal philosophy. 

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The problem Kerruish interrogates in The Wrong of Law (WoL) is immense. She asks, what is it about the form of law that modern law is, that leads to its inability to admit of its own failure? For Kerruish, modern law is framed by a logic whereby it can not permit itself to be surprised by its own lack. This is not merely callous indifference, or a case of law being in the service of property, capital, and colonialism – although each of these is undoubtably at play. To be clear – the idea of the wrong of law is not morally or ethically normative (WoL, 255). Rather, the idea of the wrong of law is concerned with the metaphysical and logical forms that ground and sustain the autonomy and authority asserted by modern law.

The wrong of law is law’s ‘failure to comprehend a failure’. In an introductory passage Kerruish compares the idea of the wrong of law to a “felt, sensed wrong” like the ‘absurdity’ that Marx named ‘fetishism’. Expressed another way, it is the “sensed wrong of thought stuck in a double failure; a failure of the universality classically attributed to laws of thought and a failure to comprehend that failure”. This failure is inherent to the form of law that modern law is (9). Challenging, isn’t it! Well, she did admit of this.

As a metaphysical and logical idea, the ‘wrong of law’ does not lead to claims that law is wrong; or presuppose a natural or moral law; prior laws of nature, God, or reason; nor an older intuitive law such as that associated with Antigone (6). ‘Law’ in Kerruish’s formulation can be modern, national, intra-national, or international – and this law may be open to surprises of new events and circumstances. While these might be ways in which this law “thinks itself as right”, it cannot and will not “surprise itself in so doing” (6). The “wrong of law is never to surprise itself in thinking itself as right” (247). This is not to say that modern law’s claim is one of perfection about its order of right, but rather “its necessity to the order of which that law is a part” (249). Put another way, ‘wrong’ in the wrong of law is “not ‘wrong’ as thought by law” (249).

When I think about an order of right that cannot surprise itself in thinking of itself as right, I often return to Justice Brennan’s assertion, set out in Mabo v Queensland (No 2)(1992), that the assertion of colonial sovereignty cannot be challenged in an Australian municipal court.^[1] In one sense this is the reiteration of a particular legal order and legal discourse as a totality (autonomy of law) that cannot countenance another law (heteronomy). Kerruish termed this a ‘virtual reality’ (176;194). But the wrong entailed in this order of right goes well beyond any legal pluralist version of critique. The idea of the ‘wrong’ cannot be apprehended at the level of ethics, discourse, rhetoric, or practical reason. 

Kerruish returns to the dialectics and antinomies that give modern thought and thus modern law its form in Kant; and treats these movements through Hegelian Logic and Marx’s account of fetishism. The antinomies of the foundation of modern thought, and modern law, are elucidated through developments in mathematical logic of the 20^th century. These are all strands in her thinking that are taken up and expressed far better than I can in the essays that follow.

The Wrong of Law is a work of legal theory for the ages.

Stewart Motha is Professor of Law at Birkbeck Law School

^[1] See Kerruish, WoL 194, where this is discussed in the context of cases after Mabo (No 2) that insisted on this non-justiciability of sovereignty as set out in Mabo: Kartinyeri v The Commonwealth of Australia (1998) 195 CLR 337, Kerruish devotes all of Ch. 5 to this case; and Yorta Yorta Aboriginal Community v Victoria (2002).