'It is a rite of passage in the early days of law school to ponder eighteenth-century jurist William Blackstone’s famous ratio, in which it is deemed ‘better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer’ (Blackstone 352), and the kind of society—or more importantly, normative vision of society—it meaningfully instantiates. The ratio, after all, as a precursor to the now commonplace presumption of innocence, suggests that the criminal division of law (and, more broadly, the rule of law and the tenets of procedural fairness it requires) has been designed so as to protect the accused from the sheer brutality of accusation, over and above its other, secondary function, which is to protect society from its criminal element, and protect victims of crime. It, then, heralds a specific political commitment: by stressing the importance of tempering the structural violence of sovereignty and the state apparatus in the organisation of a well-formed society, it correctly deemphasises or downplays the ways in which individual cases of injustice (that is, the ten guilty persons who escape) are able to shape the contours of social life.' (Introduction)
