The paper would present partial results of an ongoing project on practices of responsibility, which takes as starting point official apologies and remedies for historical injustices. The project labours at the intersection of sociology with jurisprudence. The working hypothesis is that, given law’s normative claim to correctness, its coercive force, and its priority in normative social hierarchies, legal practices of responsibility might contribute to organizing social practices of irresponsibility. The role of legal cultures in not only the prevention and condemnation of harm, but also in its delivery and legitimization is a well-known topic; peculiar attention is therefore given to the compartmentalisation of responsibility (role responsibility; backward and forward looking responsibility; different legal paradigms of responsibility). At this stage of research my aims are 1) to identify specific socio-legal legal practices that enable the current upsurge of ‘calls to account’ (Colonomos) for massive suffering; 2) to analyse if an emphasis on social/legal practices overcomes the difficulties engendered by ‘joint commitments’ (Gilbert) and ‘corporate agents’ (Pettit) approaches in normative and descriptive characterizations of collective responsibility; 3) If (2) is compelling, then to evaluate the claims that nations incur outcome responsibility (here I rely on the doctrine of reactive fault) or sometimes even collective guilt (Fletcher) for actions carried in their name. An aspect that should be discussed is that, traditional theories of responsibility extrapolate the conditions for individual responsibility to groups, oblivious of the fact that the causal relation pertaining to individual responsibility cannot be applied to or transferred from individuals to groups.
