Beyond Guilt and Innocence:
Re-Imagining Justice without Civil or Criminal Borders
If human conduct lives in shades of grey, why do we divide justice into black and white?
Every act, whether deemed right or wrong, arises from a continuum of human experience; emotion, context, and circumstance. Yet the law persists in fragmenting this complexity into two opposing realms: civil and criminal, private and public, harm and offence. This division, once a pragmatic invention, now breeds confusion, contradiction, and injustice.
In Beyond Guilt and Innocence, Omolaja Makinee dismantles the centuries-old architecture of this legal dualism. Drawing on moral philosophy, behavioural insight, and jurisprudential analysis, this book reveals how the separation of law into “civil” and “criminal” categories distorts both justice and truth; punishing some while concealing the full story of others.
Through vivid case studies and conceptual clarity, Makinee exposes how the current system conceals context; the most essential ingredient of fairness; behind verdicts of “guilty” and “innocent.” When the law hides the reasons behind conduct, the public sees only labels, not lives.
Makinee proposes a bold alternative: a unified participatory model of justice, where responsibility replaces guilt, context replaces concealment, and resolution replaces punishment. Here, justice becomes a shared civic act; transparent, educative, and humane; restoring coherence to a system that has long mistaken form for fairness.
Justice, to be just, must embrace the whole spectrum of human conduct; not divide it.
Publication Date : November 04, 2025
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