I am Legend, But Am I Reasonable? A Brief Reflection on Legal Objectivity and Community Standards

James Watson

“And suddenly he thought, I'm the abnormal one now. Normalcy was a majority concept, the standard of many and not the standard of just one man.”

- I am Legend (1954) [1]

 

In Richard Matheson’s 1954 horror novel I am Legend[2] the protagonist, Robert Neville, spends the novel looking for a cure to an illness that has spread and transformed most of humanity into violent “vampires”. He spends his days hunting those vampires down, breaking into their houses and killing them in their sleep. He fortifies his house, finding himself besieged by these creatures for days on end in response to his nighttime hunting.

In the dénouement of the novel, he is captured and comes to the realisation that the vampires are sentient, functioning and have formed their own society, the world has moved on without him. The idea of hunting these vampires, is flipped on its head. His values no longer align with broader society, he has become the ‘legend’, a ‘boogeyman’ of sorts that children fear. Ultimately, his actions were, in the eyes of wider society, not ‘reasonable’, not ‘normal’ and certainly not adherent to wider Community Standards.

 

Reasonableness

Reasonableness is a powerful concept in law, and it is intrinsically linked to normalcy. To ‘be reasonable’ is, we are taught in the early years of legal education, to act how most other people would act, and, more important, to not act in a way most other people would say they would not act. To act reasonably, you employ your faculty of reason. Judges and adjudicators give reasons for the ruling they made. Similarly, a judge might be said to be ‘unreasonable’ for not giving reasons for their decisions.

This deployment of the language of reason is a powerful rhetorical tool. Reasonability is taught to law students as the ‘objective standard’ - it frames legal issues not within the contextual space within which they occurred, where it is employed, say, in an action for negligence. That, instead, is the role of the subjective standard, which frames the issue to be determined in the light of the situation and the subjective thoughts of the actors in that situation.

Reasonableness frames legal issues through the lens of what the legal fiction of the ‘reasonable person’ would have done and whether the acts/omissions at issue before the court match those general expectations. For non-legal readers, the ‘reasonable person’ is a fictional person imagined by the judge or jury who is starkly average and adheres to community norms, the legal questions are then put as if they were about this fictional person, the finder of fact will ask what the ‘reasonable person’ would have done in the same situation. This is how we evaluate how ‘reasonable’ someone has acted in law.

The modest goal of this article is to reflect on the idea of the ‘reasonable person’ and reasonableness in law, as a reflection of community standards. I will elaborate on what I mean by Community Standards and then comment on the potential dangers and limitations of treating reasonableness as purely objective.  Hanging our understanding of reasonableness on the values of the wider community is a further issue I will discuss.

 

Community Standards

Community Standards in this article refers to the shared values of a given group. I note here that the Community Standards that end up becoming the ‘reasonable’ standard are the shared values of the most powerful within a society. Any collective of people will, invariably, be made up of groups with differing ideologies, priorities, preconceptions, traditions, and conventions. It follows that, with the increase in the number of differing groups that make up a society, the harder it is to find a majority that will agree on much beyond the bare minimum needed to sustain human life – everyone values food and shelter, but not everyone agrees on the methods best used to distribute these resources within society.

Community standards are adaptable and invariably will change over time. Some, like Robert Neville, might find themselves one day being cast from their comfortable position of being in the majority and suddenly becoming deviant in the eyes of wider society.

The ‘community standards’ are not necessarily those that are held by the majority within society, they are the preserve of the ‘interpretative communities’, who decide what is reasonable based on their values, ideologies, priorities, preconceptions, traditions, and conventions. These interpretative communities are judges, legislators and private institutions with power, all groups with the power to shape the law around reasonableness.

That is not to say that the values of any given community are not in some way a function of its make-up. The interpretative communities that arise are still made up of those communities, however not necessarily from an even distribution across that community. For example, most of our judges are relatively well-off white, middle-class, privately educated men who were once long-practising barristers, and the standards of reasonability they interpret, enforce and rule on through the courts will generally reflect that. In this example, they are the powerful small interpretative community, enforcing their standard of reasonability against individual members of the community who may not share their values.

This tells us something about community values – they are a function of community perspective, but importantly the perspective of the most powerful.  It follows from this that, even if community values form our concept of reasonableness, not everyone within that community will agree on what is reasonable. Take a ‘deviant characteristic’ – which I here define as one not represented by the views of the interpretative community – POC, members of the travelling community, LGBTQ+ people and others who find themselves in the minority – their perspectives, choices and opinions might not align with the perspectives and opinions that are held, at law, to be the ‘reasonable’ standard. Richard Neville, with his perspective and experience, acted completely within reason when he undertook to eliminate the vampires, the deviant characteristic in his case being, ironically, his humanity. The wider community disagreed with him and his methods.

 

Bell v Tavistock

The case of Bell v Tavistock[3] provides a striking contemporary example of how the legal standard of reasonableness is applied in ways that reflect the values of dominant interpretative communities. This UK case involved a challenge to the practice of prescribing puberty blockers to minors with gender dysphoria, with the claimants arguing that children under 16 could not provide informed consent to such treatment. In its 2020 ruling, the High Court of England and Wales sided with the claimants, holding that it was "highly unlikely" that minors could comprehend the long-term consequences of puberty blockers, and thus could not reasonably consent to this form of treatment. The Court imposed a specific, restrictive view of reasonableness, one that arguably reflected broader societal discomfort with gender-affirming medical treatment for minors, rather than the nuanced realities faced by transgender youth.

The High Court's reasoning exemplifies how the legal concept of reasonableness can be used as a tool to enforce community standards—standards that may not reflect the diversity of those affected by the law. Much like the interpretative community of judges and legislators I discuss earlier, the High Court in Bell adopted a view of what is reasonable for children. This view assumed that the ability to consent was a purely cognitive process, disconnected from the lived experiences of transgender individuals and the medical consensus on gender dysphoria treatment. The ruling underscores the fact that reasonableness is not a fixed, universal measure but one deeply embedded in the values and ideologies of the dominant interpretative community—in this case, a judiciary primarily composed of individuals with limited experience or understanding of transgender issues.

The Court of Appeal's 2021 decision to overturn the ruling highlights the fluid and contested nature of reasonableness. By restoring the authority of clinicians to assess whether minors can consent to puberty blockers, the court acknowledged the expertise of the medical community as an interpretative body with its own standards of reasonableness, grounded in clinical practice and patient autonomy. This shift mirrors the narrative arc of I Am Legend, where the protagonist’s understanding of what is reasonable and normal is shattered by the realisation that society’s values have evolved without him. Similarly, the Court of Appeal’s judgment recognised that the rigid application of a supposedly objective standard of reasonableness can marginalise individuals whose perspectives and needs fall outside the mainstream.

In both Bell v Tavistock and I Am Legend, the application of reasonableness reflects the dominant values of those in power and, when left unchecked, can perpetuate harmful assumptions about what is "normal".  The High Court’s original decision imposed a restrictive community standard that effectively silenced the voices of transgender youth, deeming their choices and experiences unreasonable by default. The Court of Appeal’s reversal, in contrast, demonstrates how legal standards of reasonableness can evolve as new interpretative communities—whether medical professionals or minority groups—gain influence in shaping the discourse. The Bell case thus serves as a powerful reminder of the dangers of treating reasonableness as an objective standard, and the importance of ensuring that the law remains responsive to the diverse perspectives of those it governs.

 

‘Reasonable Unreasonableness’

The danger posed here is that the ‘objective’ standard of reasonableness imposed by areas of law on unrepresentative interpretative communities could erase completely rational decisions made by minority actors who fall outside the scope of what has been determined to be reasonable. Reasonableness is a neat linguistic trick as it assumes its own authority.

It is important to note that reasonable standard is not used everywhere in law. In situations such as home invasion, the law modifies the ‘reasonable force’ standard to be reasonable as the homeowner believed them to be[4]thereby considering individual circumstances and shifting the reasonable standard away from a nebulous simulacrum or puppeteering of the ‘reasonable person’ to a construction of the defendant before the court at a given moment, or, in a more accurate way, still puppeteering the ‘reasonable person’, but in this case the puppet has the defendant’s opinions and perspectives.

Notwithstanding the fact that ‘reasonableness’ is not a universal legal standard, it seems to be a go-to for many rules designed to co-ordinate the community – the most salient in recent memory being the ‘reasonable excuse’ exception to travel during lockdown during the COVID-19 pandemic. Notably, early in the regulatory framework for managing the pandemic, these provisions were explicitly non-penal, designed to co-ordinate the community and promulgate rules that everyone could follow without the threat of criminal sanction. However, when society is governed by what is and what is not ‘reasonable’, the decision of what is and isn’t reasonable falls onto the enforcers and arbitrators of those laws, those in ‘interpretative communities. Everyone has their own concept of what is and isn’t reasonable, their own values, preconceptions, priorities and goals.

You can’t rule by reasonableness alone. If you accept that society is made up of various groups, alongside the premise that Community Standards are defined by those in power – then deciding what is and isn’t reasonable is a lucrative power for interpretative communities as, then by proxy, they control the actions of society writ large. Control over the meaning of reasonableness, through adjudication or rulemaking, means you control what is objective, and therefore, what is “true”, and where the starting point is for any discourse deriving from norms of any kind.

 

Conclusion

I do not advocate for the excise of ‘reasonableness’, but rather for a caution in its use and caution in its interpretation as “objective”. It is undeniable that the phrase has great economic value and serves to temper our rules by integrating the wider community’s perspective. However, the unchecked use of reasonableness in laws can devalue genuine attempts at co-ordination, such as the COVID regulations. It also obfuscates the power dynamics present throughout legal and societal discourse – the concept is not as objective as it would initially seem.

In I Am Legend, Robert Neville's journey from hunter to hunted mirrors the fluid and subjective nature of reasonableness in law. At the start, Neville views his actions—killing vampires to protect himself —as entirely reasonable, grounded in his belief that he is preserving what remains of humanity. Yet as the story progresses, the evolving societal norms reveal Neville as an outsider, and what was once seen as rational is now monstrous. This shift in perspective highlights a critical parallel to the legal concept of the "reasonable person," which is often assumed to be objective but is shaped by the dominant community’s values. Just as Neville's understanding of normalcy is shattered by the new world order, legal standards of reasonableness are fluid, contingent upon who holds power and how society’s values evolve. This invites us to reflect on how the law, like Neville’s actions, can marginalise those who do not conform to the majority’s view of what is rational or reasonable, underscoring the dangers of an uncritical application of community-based standards in judicial decision-making.

 

[1] PhD Candidate in School of Law, TCD. Former Judicial Assistant to the High Court; This article started as a response paper in an undergraduate module I took in 2021, Critical Perspectives on Law, in Trinity College Dublin. At the very outset I would like to thank Dr. David Kenny and Dr. Alan Brady for giving me the comfort and space to express my thoughts about law through the lens of literature.

[2] Not the movie starring Will Smith, please read the original novel.

[3] Bell v Tavistock [2021] EWCA Civ 1363

[4] s. 2(1)(b) Criminal Law (Defence and the Dwelling) Act 2011

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