The process and the substance of law are very different things, particularly when looked at in a cross-national perspective. Yesterday's sensational reversal of the verdict of second degree murder against Louise Woodward by Judge Hiller Zobel in Cambridge, Massachusetts, followed by his sentence effectively releasing her, has attracted unprecedented international attention and debate on contemporary child-rearing practices.
The general relief that this young woman has been spared a sentence of 15 to 20 years as a result of a compassionate and rigorous process of law is tempered by concern that a baby is dead as a result of neglect and culpable action, and the knowledge that the accused had been found guilty of murder by a jury. Massachusetts has a very long and sophisticated legal tradition, of which much commentary on the case has failed to take adequate account. The right of a judge to change a jury's verdict on points of law is very well anchored in it, as was carefully expressed in yesterday's lengthy ruling.
Just because it is alien to the British (and Irish) legal tradition is no good reason to dismiss such procedures. Broadly similar legal traditions can learn from one another, all the more so after the huge public interest the Woodward case has attracted as a result of being televised. Nonetheless, the O.J. Simpson verdict sits uneasily with this outcome - and so do many miscarriages of justice in the British jurisdiction over recent decades, not least those involving Irish people. A measure of cross-national humility is in order.
The law's substance emerges well from the case. Judge Zobel's decision to reverse the jury's verdict that Louise Woodward was guilty of second degree murder was based on a scrupulous legal analysis of the evidence put forward. He distinguished carefully between the confusion, frustration, inexperience, immaturity, bad judgment and anger that contributed to the death of nine-month-old Matthew Eappen - saying it amounted to involuntary manslaughter - and the malice necessary to find Louise Woodward guilty of murder. This young woman was largely a victim of circumstances, in this account, not the cold-blooded and dissembling killer painted by the prosecution.
The case has been as important for its sociological as its legal dimensions. That the intensity of professional working life should necessitate such a common resort to teenage child minders in the US has come as a revelation there and in Europe. Child care arrangements are an important indicator of contemporary civilisation; they have not been addressed at all adequately on either side of the Atlantic. Behind the human tragedy and televised drama these central questions remain to be resolved. If only because it has raised them this case has deserved its extraordinary international publicity and attention.