In this and the following chapters, I analyse several attempts to interrupt the abyssal nature of modern law emerging from my previous research on sociology of law. I try to identify the reasons why most of such attempts failed or are about to fail. This chapter analyses the phenomenon of popular justice in Portugal during the revolutionary crisis that became known as the 25 April Revolution or Carnation Revolution. During the course of the revolutionary crisis (April 1974-November 1975) many popular movements emerged. They differed in terms of social objectives, strategy and tactics, organisational strength, degree of control by formal political organisations, and other factors, but shared the same class composition: the urban or rural working class (and occasionally the peasantry) allied themselves with radicalised sectors of the urban petty bourgeoisie. As these movements emerged during a revolutionary crisis, all of them questioned the legitimacy of the capitalist state. Popular justice in Portugal after 25 April 1974 involved a wide range of actions varying in political scope, the degree and type of popular mobilisation and internal organisation, and the level of confrontation with official justice. As a descriptive strategy, the range of cases and situations may be grouped into two categories: the struggle for the redefinition of criminal justice, and the struggle for the right to decent housing. Within each category, I begin with a brief narrative of cases that relate more or less remotely to the concept of popular justice and then concentrate my analysis on the most representative examples. Were there failed attempts at post-abyssal legality?

This chapter analyses a different type of the popular justice with reference to Cape Verde Islands after their independence from Portuguese colonialism (1975). It is a form of institutionalised justice, officially recognised as such, incorporated in one way or another into the general justice administration system (which is sometimes broadly described as popular justice in light of its local normative, institutional, cultural, and discursive nature, accessibility and deprofessionalised personnel. The Cape Verde local or people’s courts were founded as an extension of indigenous forms of justice administration created as alternatives to colonial law and justice in the liberated zones in Guinea‑Bissau. They were initially adopted informally, then made official in 1979. Through the local courts, the state aimed to encourage popular participation and create spaces in which community culture could flourish, while the values and actions which they stimulated were defined in terms of political criteria directed towards achieving a higher purpose, namely building socialism. I begin with a close-up of a local court at work on the island of São Vicente, before analysing in detail the interfaces and contradictions between the political and judicial legitimacy of the people’s courts, ending with the conclusions of the research and a postscript written forty years later.

In 1970, a senior civil servant in the British Home Office published The Conquest of Violence, which chronicled what he considered to be a social triumph within the United Kingdom. The book was an expression of the way that many felt in the European liberal democracies a generation after the Second World War. It built on perceptions apparent during the nineteenth century that violence, especially criminal violence and harsh responses by those in authority were alien to what were essentially progressive and humanitarian developments within European culture and society. The aims of this chapter are to probe such beliefs particularly with reference to criminal violence and responses to it. It assesses the ways in which the media have provided vicarious thrills since the early nineteenth century, the construction of a criminal class as a separate social group, and the ways in which eyes were closed to violence by agents of the state who were perceived as disciplining the uncivilized.