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The Metaphor of Proportionality
I am grateful to Hanna Pickard, Thomas Poole, David Gurnham, and two JLS referees for helpful comments on a previous draft of this article, and to Victoria McGeer and Philip Pettit for discussion of its argument. I would also like to thank colleagues at an LSE Law Department research seminar for helpful feedback.
Abstract
The idea of proportionality has figured prominently in moral, legal, and political theory. It has been central to the articulation of an ideal of limited punishment in modern legal orders, and to judicial and academic efforts to lay down standards for legitimate state conduct in a range of areas. Setting out from a broad view of the role of metaphor, I map histories of proportionality in different spheres (law, politics, culture), spaces (nation states and regions), and legal areas (criminal, public, international, and private law), before moving on to consider the conditions under which abstract ideas like proportionality assume a salience within particular spheres of legal or political discourse. Focusing on the case of appeals to proportionality in criminal justice, I develop an argument about the conditions under which they enjoy some capacity to coordinate expectations or beliefs, and consider how far this thesis might be generalizable to other fields.