Stateless Law: Evolving Boundaries of a Discipline 9781315610719

This volume offers a critical analysis and illustration of the challenges and promises of ’stateless’ law thought, pedag

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Stateless Law: Evolving Boundaries of a Discipline
 9781315610719

Table of contents :
Cover......Page 1
Contents......Page 6
List of Abbreviations of Periodical
Titles Cited in this Collection......Page 8
Notes on Contributors......Page 12
Preface and Acknowledgements......Page 16
Foreword......Page 20
Prologue......Page 22
1 Stateless Law: Before, Inside and Outside the Law of the State......Page 24
Part I
Introduction: Situating Stateless Law......Page 28
2 Stating Boundaries: The Law, Disciplined......Page 30
3 Teaching Law: ‘Historian and Prophet All in One’......Page 44
Part II
The ‘Discipline’ of Stateless Law......Page 52
4 Back to the Future......Page 54
5 Law as an Academic Discipline......Page 64
6 Doctrinal Knowledge, Legal Doctrinal Scholarship and the Problem of Interdisciplinary Engagement......Page 82
7 The Structure of Stateless Law......Page 92
Part III
The Forms and Aspirations of Stateless Law......Page 102
8 Brève théorie culturelle du droit......Page 104
9 Un-stating Law......Page 126
10 The Study of Legal Plurality outside ‘Legal Pluralism’: The Future of the Discipline?......Page 136
11 Stateless Law: From Legitimacy to Validity......Page 154
12 Non ratione imperii, sed imperio rationis......Page 164
Part IV
The Practice, Teaching and
Learning of Stateless Law......Page 178
13 Thinking, Doing, Being: Why ‘Practising’ Law Matters to the Prevention of Torture......Page 180
14 Qu’est-ce qu’une « faculté » de droit? De la philosophie au droit......Page 196
15 Everything Old Is New Again: Stateless Law, the State of the Law Schools and Comparative Legal/Normative History......Page 208
16 The Impact of ‘Stateless Law’ on Legal Pedagogy......Page 222
Epilogue......Page 234
17 What Lies Before, Behind and Beneath a Case? Five Minutes on Transnational Lawyering and the Consequences for Legal Education......Page 236
Index......Page 252

Citation preview

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Stateless Law

This collection is a brilliant, insightful resource on the relationships between the law and the state in the West. A must-have for anyone interested in critically understanding the historical process of construction of Western law as an intellectual (and largely stateless) discipline. Mauro Bussani, University of Trieste, Italy Legal educators must open their students to a world of multi-national markets and corporations, the European Union, and the increasing federalization of existing nations, a world in which the identity of law and state is increasingly destabilized. This remarkable set of essays, owing so much to McGill University’s trail-blazing effort to shape the legal education it offers to these realities, sets a high standard for scholarship on this challenge. Peter L. Strauss, Columbia Law School, USA Stateless Law is an extremely impressive collection of ground-breaking contributions concentrating on a much-needed and overdue systematic exploration of law outside of the territorial paradigm. There is a need of this kind of “undisciplined” scholarship to overcome a state-centered bias that still spells the western lawyer. Ugo Mattei, UC Hastings, USA and University of Turin, Italy

Juris Diversitas Series Editors:

Seán Patrick Donlan, University of Limerick, Limerick, Ireland Julian Sidoli del Ceno, Birmingham School of the Built Environment, Birmingham City University, UK

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Editorial Board:

Olivier Moréteau – Louisiana, US Ignazio Castellucci – Trento, Italy/Macau, China Lukas Heckendorn Urscheler – Swiss Institute of Comparative Law, Switzerland Salvatore Mancuso – Cape Town, South Africa Christa Rautenbach – North-West University, Potchefstroom, South Africa

Series Advisory Board:

Philip Bailhache – Jersey, UK Sue Farran – Northumbria, UK Patrick Glenn† – McGill, Canada Marie Goré – Pantheon-Assas (Paris 2), France Werner Menski – SOAS, London, UK Esin Örücü – Glasgow, UK (Emeritus) Vernon Valentine Palmer – Tulane, US Rodolfo Sacco – Turin, Italy (Emeritus) William Twining – University College London, UK (Emeritus) and Miami, US Jacques Vanderlinden – Free University of Brussels, Belgium (Emeritus) and Moncton, Canada (Emeritus) Rooted in comparative law, the Juris Diversitas series focuses on the interdisciplinary study of legal and normative mixtures and movements. Our interest is in comparison broadly conceived, extending beyond law narrowly understood to related fields. Titles might be geographical or temporal comparisons. They could focus on theory and methodology, substantive law, or legal cultures. They could investigate official or unofficial ‘legalities’, past and present and around the world. And, to effectively cross spatial, temporal, and normative boundaries, inter- and multi-disciplinary research is particularly welcome. Forthcoming titles in the series: Mixed Legal Systems, East and West Edited by Vernon Valentine Palmer, Mohamed Y. Mattar and Anna Koppel ISBN 978 1 4724 3106 6 Of Doubt and Proof Ritual and Legal Practices of Judgment Edited by Daniela Berti, Anthony Good and Gilles Tarabout ISBN 978 1 4724 3451 7 For more information on this series, visit www.ashgate.com

Stateless Law

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Evolving Boundaries of a Discipline

Edited by Helge Dedek McGill University, Canada Shauna Van Praagh McGill University, Canada

First published 2015 by Ashgate Publishing Published 2016 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

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Copyright © Helge Dedek, Shauna Van Praagh and the contributors 2015 Helge Dedek and Shauna Van Praagh have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the editors of this work. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Stateless law : evolving boundaries of a discipline / by Helge Dedek and Shauna Van Praagh. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978–1–4724–2784–7 (hardback : alk. paper) 1. Legal polycentricity. 2. Customary law. 3. International regimes I. Dedek, Helge, 1973– editor. II. Van Praagh, Shauna, editor. K236.S73 2015 340.9–dc23 2014030866 ISBN 9781472427847 (hbk) ISBN 9781315610719 (ebk)

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Contents List of Abbreviations of Periodical Titles Cited in this Collection vii Notes on Contributors xi Preface and Acknowledgements xv Forewordxix Prologue 1

Stateless Law: Before, Inside and Outside the Law of the State Sally Engle Merry

Part I

3

Introduction: Situating Stateless Law

2

Stating Boundaries: The Law, Disciplined Helge Dedek

3

Teaching Law: ‘Historian and Prophet All in One’ Shauna Van Praagh

9 23

Part II The ‘Discipline’ of Stateless Law 4

Back to the Future Ernest J. Weinrib

33

5

Law as an Academic Discipline Hanoch Dagan

43

6

Doctrinal Knowledge, Legal Doctrinal Scholarship and the Problem of Interdisciplinary Engagement Mátyás Bódig

7

The Structure of Stateless Law Michelle Cumyn

61 71

Part III The Forms and Aspirations of Stateless Law 8

Brève théorie culturelle du droit Louis Assier-Andrieu

9

Un-stating Law Mark Antaki

83 105

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vi 10

The Study of Legal Plurality outside ‘Legal Pluralism’: The Future of the Discipline? Maxime St-Hilaire

115

11

Stateless Law: From Legitimacy to Validity Jaye Ellis

133

12

Non ratione imperii, sed imperio rationis143 Frédéric Zenati-Castaing

Part IV  The Practice, Teaching and Learning of Stateless Law 13

Thinking, Doing, Being: Why ‘Practising’ Law Matters to the Prevention of Torture Stephen J. Toope

159

14

Qu’est-ce qu’une «faculté» de droit? De la philosophie au droit Vincent Forray

175

15

Everything Old Is New Again: Stateless Law, the State of the Law Schools and Comparative Legal/Normative History Seán Patrick Donlan

16

The Impact of ‘Stateless Law’ on Legal Pedagogy Rosalie Jukier

187 201

Epilogue 17 Index

What Lies Before, Behind and Beneath a Case? Five Minutes on Transnational Lawyering and the Consequences for Legal Education Peer Zumbansen

215 231

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List of Abbreviations of Periodical Titles Cited in this Collection

Abbreviations from the Canadian Guide to Uniform Legal Citation, 7th ed (Toronto: Carswell, 2010). Abbreviation

Periodical Title

Alta L Rev ABA J Am J Comp L Am J Legal Hist ARSP Ariz J Int’l & Comp L Berkeley J Int’l L BCL Rev BUL Rev Brit J Crim Brook L Rev C de D Cal L Rev Cal WL Rev Cambridge LJ Can Bus LJ Can JL & Jur CJLS Can L L Cath Law Chicago-Kent L Rev Colum J Transnat’l L Colum L Rev CML Rev Cornell L Rev Curr Legal Probs Dal LJ Dr et Soc EJCL EJIL Eur J L Ref Eur LJ Ga L Rev Harv L Rev Ind J Global Legal Stud ICLQ Int’l J Legal Info J Disp Resol JL & Soc’y

Alberta Law Review American Bar Association Journal American Journal of Comparative Law American Journal of Legal History Archiv für rechts- und Sozialphilosophie Arizona Journal of International & Comparative Law Berkeley Journal of International Law Boston College Law Review Boston University Law Review British Journal of Criminology Brooklyn Law Review Cahiers de droit California Law Review California Western Law Review Cambridge Law Journal Canadian Business Law Journal Canadian Journal of Law and Jurisprudence Canadian Journal of Law and Society Canadian Law Libraries Catholic Lawyer Chicago Kent Law Review Columbia Journal of Transnational Law Columbia Law Review Common Market Law Review Cornell Law Review Current Legal Problems Dalhousie Law Journal Droit et Société Electronic Journal of Comparative Law European Journal of International Law European Journal of Law Reform European Law Journal Georgia Law Review Harvard Law Review Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies Intellectual and Comparative Law Quarterly International Journal of Legal Information Journal of Dispute Resolution Journal of Law and Society

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viii JL Econ & Org J Legal Educ J Legal Hist J Legal Pluralism J Legal Stud J Legal Prof Law & Contemp Probs Law & Soc Inquiry Law & Soc’y Rev LHR Law Q Rev LS La L Rev Loy LA L Rev Marq L Rev McGill LJ Mich J Int’l L Mich L Rev Mod L Rev Monash UL Rev Nordic J Int’l L Nw UL Rev Osgoode Hall LJ Oxford J Legal Stud Queen’s LJ RCDS RDUS Rev DU RIDC RTD civ Rutgers L Rev Sask L Rev S Cal L Rev Stan L Rev Sydney L Rev Tex L Rev Theor Inq L Tul L Rev UCLA L Rev Unif L Rev U Chicago L Rev U Colo L Rev U Ill L Rev U Miami L Rev U Mich JL Reform U Pa L Rev UTLJ Vand J Transnat’l L Vand L Rev VUWLR Va L Rev Wash & Lee L Rev

Stateless Law Journal of Law, Economics & Organization Journal of Legal Education Journal of Legal History Journal of Legal Pluralism and Unofficial Law (formerly Journal of Legal Pluralism) Journal of Legal Studies Journal of the Legal Profession Law & Contemporary Problems Law & Social Inquiry Law & Society Review Law and History Review Law Quarterly Review Legal Studies Louisiana Law Review Loyola of Los Angeles Law Review Marquette Law Review McGill Law Journal Michigan Journal of International Law Michigan Law Review Modern Law Review Monash University Law Review Nordic Journal of International Law Northwestern University Law Review Osgoode Hall Law Journal Oxford Journal of Legal Studies Queen’s Law Journal Revue canadienne de droit et société Revue de droit de l’Université de Sherbrooke Revue de droit uniforme Revue internationale de droit comparé Revue trimestrielle de droit civil Rutgers Law Review Saskatchewan Law Review Southern California Law Review Stanford Law Review Sydney Law Review Texas Law Review Theoretical Inquiries in Law Tulane Law Review UCLA Law Review Uniform Law Review University of Chicago Law Review University of Colorado Law Review University of Illinois Law Review University of Miami Law Review University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform University of Pennsylvania Law Review University of Toronto Law Journal Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law Vanderbilt Law Review Victoria University of Wellington Law Review Virginia Law Review Washington & Lee Law Review

List of Abbreviations of Periodical Titles

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Wash L Rev Wayne L Rev Windsor YB Access J Wis L Rev Yale LJ Z Eu P

Washington Law Review Wayne Law Review Windsor Yearbook of Access to Justice Wisconsin Law Review Yale Law Journal Zeitschrift für Europäisches Privatrecht

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Notes on Contributors Mark Antaki is an Associate Professor at McGill University’s Faculty of Law, as well as a Fellow of McGill University’s Institute for the Public Life of Arts and Ideas. He holds a Ph.D. in Jurisprudence and Social Policy from the University of California, Berkeley. His recent publications include “‘No Foundations’?” (2014) 11 No Foundations: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Law and Justice 61; “From The Bridge to the Book: An Examination of South Africa’s Transformative Constitutionalism’s Neglected Metaphor” in Stewart Motha & Karin van Marle, eds, Genres of Critique: Law, Aesthetics and Liminality (Stellenbosch University Press, 2013) 49; “Genre, Critique, and Human Rights” (2013) 82 University of Toronto Quarterly 974 (special issue on law and literature) and “The Turn to Imagination in Legal Theory: The Re-Enchantment of the World?” (2012) 23 Law and Critique 1. His current research spells out some of the shorthand of contemporary constitutional law, examines some neglected practices of legal education and thinks through the representation of ‘the people’ in various media. He is also completing a book manuscript regarding the pre-history of the idea of a crime against humanity. Louis Assier-Andrieu est titulaire de trois doctorats (droit, histoire et anthropologie). Ses travaux, théoriques et empiriques, portent sur l’anthropologie historique des cultures juridiques occidentales. Il a enseigné dans diverses universités européennes et américaines. Il est directeur de recherche (research professor) au Centre national de la recherche scientifique (France) et professeur à l’Ecole de droit de Sciences Po (Paris). Il a publié de nombreux articles et livres parmi lesquels L’autorité du passé : Essai anthropologique sur la Common Law (2011), Les avocats : Identité, culture et devenir (2011), Le droit dans les sociétés humaines (1996). Mátyás Bódig LL.B, Ph.D., Dr Habil, is Senior Lecturer at the Law School of the University of Aberdeen, UK. In Aberdeen, he is the Deputy Director of the Centre for Citizenship, Civil Society and Rule of Law, and the programme coordinator of the LL.M. in Human Rights. Dr Bódig has established himself as a legal theorist, and his publications span a range of subjects from jurisprudential methodology, through conceptual legal theory and political philosophy, to international human rights law. His current research revolves around the methodological profile of doctrinal legal scholarship, the patterns of doctrinal development in international human rights law and the integration of political ideals (like the rule of law) into international norms. Michelle Cumyn doctorat en droit privé (Université de Paris I – Panthéon-Sorbonne), B.C.L., LL.B. (McGill), B.A. (McGill), is a professor at the Faculty of Law, Laval University, where she teaches the civil law of obligations, an overview of common law private law and judicial review. Her areas of research include remedies, legal relations involving more than two parties, sale, administration of the property of others, notfor-profit organizations and consumer protection, as well as comparative law and legal methodology. She is a regular participant in working groups of the Uniform Law Conference of Canada and is an elected member of the International Academy of Comparative Law. She was a Visiting Scholar at Queen’s University, Canada, in 2006–2007 and with the Lehrstuhl for Private Law, Private International Law and Comparative Law at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität, Germany, in 2014. Hanoch Dagan is the Stewart and Judy Colton Chair in Legal Theory and Innovation at Tel Aviv University Faculty of Law, a senior fellow at the Israel Democracy Institute, and a member of the American Law Institute and of the International Academy of Comparative Law. Professor Dagan received an LL.M. and a J.S.D. from Yale Law School, where he held a Fulbright award, after receiving his LL.B. summa cum laude from Tel Aviv University. He is a former Dean of the Faculty of Law at Tel Aviv University and the founding director of the Zvi Meitar Center for Advanced Legal Studies. Prior to becoming Dean, he was Director of the Cegla Center for Interdisciplinary Research of the Law and Editor-in-Chief of Theoretical Inquiries in Law. Professor

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Dagan has also written over 50 articles in leading American law journals and reviews, as well as six books, among them The Law and Ethics of Restitution (Cambridge University Press, 2004), Property: Values and Institutions (Oxford University Press, 2011) and Reconstructing American Legal Realism & Rethinking Private Law Theory (Oxford University Press, 2013). Helge Dedek is an Associate Professor of Law and the Director of the Institute of Comparative Law at McGill University, Faculty of Law, Montreal, Canada, where he teaches courses in private law, legal history and legal theory. He holds a doctoral degree from the University of Bonn (Germany), two German ‘State Examination’ degrees in law, and an LL.M. degree from Harvard Law School, where he was a Langdon H. Gammon Fellow. He is a Co-Editor-in-Chief of the American Journal of Comparative Law and an elected member of the International Academy of Comparative Law. He has been an invited Fellow at the Käte Hamburger Center for Advanced Study in the Humanities ‘Law as Culture’ at the University of Bonn and an invited Fellow at the Max-Planck-Institute for Comparative and International Private Law in Hamburg. Seán Patrick Donlan holds a J.D. (Louisiana) and Ph.D. (Trinity College Dublin), and teaches at the University of Limerick, Ireland. He is President of Juris Diversitas, General Secretary of the World Society of Mixed Jurisdiction Jurists, and a member of the International Academy of Comparative Law. He is also the Editor of Comparative Legal History (Hart) and the General Editor of the Juris Diversitas Book Series (Ashgate), and serves on the International Advisory Boards of the Journal of Civil Law Studies (Louisiana) and the International Journal of Law in Context (Cambridge). Most recently, Dr Donlan co-edited Concepts of Law: Comparative, Jurisprudential, and Social Science Perspectives (Ashgate, 2014) and A Study of Mixed Legal Systems: Endangered, Entrenched or Blended (Ashgate, 2014). He is currently co-editing The Laws’ Many Bodies, c. 1600–1900 for Duncker & Humblot. Jaye Ellis B.A. Hons (Calgary), LL.B., B.C.L. (McGill), LL.M. (UBC), D.C.L. (McGill), is Associate Professor in the Faculty of Law and School of Environment at McGill University (Montreal, Canada) and Hydro-Québec Sustainable Development Scholar. She teaches and conducts research in the fields of public international law, international environmental law and global environmental politics. Her current research projects focus on the role of non-state actors in the development of international law; autopoietic theory and network approaches to governance; and the interrelation of science, politics, economics and law in environmental governance. Her recent publications include “Unilateral Exercises of Public Authority: Addressing Issues of Fairness in Teck v. Pakootas” (2012) 25:2 Leiden Journal of International Law 397; “Shades of Grey: Soft Law and the Validity of Public International Law” (2012) 25:2 Leiden Journal of International Law 313; and “General Principles and Comparative Law” (2011) 22:4 European Journal of International Relations 949. Sally Engle Merry is Silver Professor of Anthropology at New York University, Faculty Co-Director of the Center for Human Rights and Global Justice at the New York University School of Law and President of the American Ethnological Society. Her recent books include Colonizing Hawai’i (Princeton, 2000), Human Rights and Gender Violence (Chicago, 2006), Gender Violence: A Cultural Perspective (Blackwell, 2009) and The Practice of Human Rights (co-edited with Mark Goodale, Cambridge, 2007). She received the Hurst Prize for Colonizing Hawai’i in 2002, the Kalven Prize for scholarly contributions to socio-legal scholarship in 2007 and the J.I. Staley Prize for Human Rights and Gender Violence in 2010. She is currently writing a book on indicators as a technology of knowledge used for human rights monitoring and global governance. Vincent Forray est professeur adjoint à la Faculté de droit de l’Université McGill où il enseigne le droit des obligations contractuelles (cours transsystémique) et le droit civil avancé des obligations. Il est membre du Centre Paul-André Crépeau de droit privé et comparé. Il est co-fondateur de la revue Jurisprudence – Revue critique dont il a été l’éditeur scientifique de plusieurs numéros en 2010, 2011 and 2012. Il est co-responsable de la revue des livres pour la Revue trimestrielle de droit civil. Il est aussi membre du comité pilotage de la Semaine doctorale intensive de l’Ecole de droit de Sciences Po et de l’Université Paris X. Vincent Forray est l’auteur d’un ouvrage tiré de sa thèse de doctorat : Le consensualisme dans la théorie générale

Notes on Contributors

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du contrat, Lextenso Editions / LGDJ, 2007. Il travaille selon une perspective critique et transsystémique dans les domaines du droit des contrats, de la responsabilité et du droit de la consommation. Ses recherches portent également sur les activités scientifiques, pédagogiques et professionnelles des juristes. Il s’intéresse en particulier aux déterminations politiques, philosophiques ou littéraires des formes juridiques, ainsi qu’à la formalisation du droit par l’écriture des juristes. Il travaille actuellement, avec le Professeur Sébastien Pimont, à un ouvrage portant sur La décriture du droit. Rosalie Jukier B.C.L., LL.B. (McGill), B.C.L. (Oxon), is Associate Professor in the Faculty of Law at McGill University (Montreal, Canada) and a member of the Paul-André Crépeau Centre for Private and Comparative Law. She teaches and conducts research in the areas of comparative private law, focusing on contracts and remedies, judicial institutions and civil procedure, the intersection between human rights and private law, judicial methodology and legal pedagogy. The recipient of faculty and university-wide teaching excellence awards, she has also served as Senior Advisor to Canada’s National Judicial Institute, an organization dedicated to the development and delivery of legal education for judges. Maxime St-Hilaire LL.D. (Laval), has been Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Law of the University of Sherbrooke (Quebec, Canada) since 2010, where he specializes in constitutional law. In 2009–2010, he clerked for the Hon. Marie Deschamps at the Supreme Court of Canada. Before that, thanks to various scholarships from SSHRC, DAAD, and other organizations, he conducted doctoral research at the Centre de philosophie juridique et politique of the University of Cergy-Pontoise (France), the Centre de recherche en éthique of the University of Montreal, and the Centre/Zentrum Marc Bloch in Berlin. He has also lectured in comparative constitutional law at the University of Montreal, and, in 2007–2008, was a trainee to the Venice Commission. Professor St-Hilaire is a member of the International Association of Constitutional Law, and serves on the Advisory Board of the Canadian Institute of Parliamentary and Political Law. Stephen J. Toope is Director of the Munk School of Global Affairs at the University of Toronto. He was previously President and Vice-Chancellor of the University of British Columbia, President of the Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation and Dean of the Faculty of Law, McGill University. A graduate of Harvard, McGill and Cambridge Universities, he also served as law clerk to The Rt. Hon. Brian Dickson, Chief Justice of Canada. His last book, Legitimacy and Legality in International Law: An Interactional Account (Cambridge University Press, 2010), co-authored with Professor Jutta Brunnee, was awarded the Certificate of Merit for Creative Scholarship by the American Society of International Law in 2011. Shauna Van Praagh B.Sc., LL.B. (Toronto), LL.M., J.S.D. (Columbia), is Associate Professor at the Faculty of Law and Institute of Comparative Law at McGill University in Montreal, Canada, where she has taught since 1995 and served as Associate Dean from 2007 to 2010. She teaches primarily in the area of obligations law, and her research and writing focus on comparative law, legal education and pedagogy, children and law, and social diversity and law. She has been an active participant and leader in the ongoing and unique development of the McGill Faculty of Law’s programmes of legal education and integrated pedagogy, and served as the 2013–2014 President of the Canadian Association of Law Teachers. Ernest J. Weinrib teaches at the University of Toronto, where he holds the rank of University Professor and Cecil A. Wright Professor of Law. He has a special interest in the theory of private law. His writings include his books The Idea of Private Law (Harvard University Press, 1995; reissued in 2012 by Oxford University Press) and Corrective Justice (Oxford University Press, 2012). He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and a foreign honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2009, he was awarded the Killam Prize, Canada’s highest honour for academic achievement. Frédéric Zenati-Castaing est professeur à l’Université de Lyon, où il enseigne le droit civil, les sources du droit, le droit comparé et la philosophie du droit. Il est également avocat au barreau de Lyon et a été membre du Conseil national des universités de 1999 à 2003. Spécialiste reconnu du domaine de la propriété, un numéro spécial de la revue japonaise Himeji International Forum of Law and Politics (n°2, 1995) a été

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consacré à ses travaux et théories sur la propriété et la prescription. La totalité de son enseignement du droit civil sera publiée aux Presses universitaires de France (PUF) en quatorze volumes. Ses autres champs de recherche sont la théorie du droit et les sources du droit. Au-delà de nombreuses publications s’intéressant à ces domaines, notamment un ouvrage sur la jurisprudence aux éditions Dalloz (1991), il a fondé en 1991 le Centre de théorie du droit de l’Université Jean Moulin. Plusieurs ouvrages sont en préparation portant sur les principes généraux du droit et sur la science du droit. Ses recherches dans le domaine des sources du droit ont été communiquées dans le cadre de conférences à la Cour de cassation et à l’étranger. Peer Zumbansen is Professor of Transnational Law and Director of the Dickson Poon School of Law at King’s College London. From 2004 until 2014, he was Professor of Law at Osgoode Hall Law School in Toronto and the Canada Research Chair in Transnational Economic Governance and Legal Theory. At Osgoode he founded and directed the Critical Research Laboratory in Law & Society, and served as Associate Dean of Research, Graduate Studies and International Relations. He holds law degrees from the University of Frankfurt (J.D. equivalent, Ph.D. in law and ‘Habilitation’), the Université de Paris X Nanterre (Licence en droit) and Harvard (LL.M.). His research focuses on corporate governance, private law theory, comparative and transnational law, European private law and legal education. He has held visiting professorships at Osgoode Hall, Idaho, Bremen, Bilbao, Oñati, Lucerne, St. Gallen, UC Dublin, Javeriana (Bogotà), Melbourne, Lisbon and, most recently, Yale Law School. In the summer of 2013, he was the inaugural Chair in Global Law at Tilburg Law School in The Netherlands and, in the fall of 2013, a Senior Research Scholar at Michigan Law School.

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Preface and Acknowledgements Stateless Law: Evolving Boundaries of a Discipline grew out of a recognition of the shifting frontiers of legal practice, education and scholarship in relation to the state, and a desire to confront and query those shifts. By exploring the boundaries of the subject areas in which they work, the seventeen authors represented in this collection are contributing to an enriched understanding and insightful questioning of the place and power of the state – now, in the past, and looking ahead. The book itself is organized to draw the attention of its readers to a spectrum of boundaries that mark law’s shape and scope. As its editors, we have strived to ensure that the format of the book reflects the ambitions of its content. This aim is perhaps most salient in Stateless Law’s bilingualism – the juxtaposition of chapters in English and in French. Reflecting the bilingual context of the McGill University Faculty of Law, which hosted the conference that initiated this project, our decision to produce a book in two languages is one illustration of the ‘evolving boundaries’ evoked in the title of the collection. The order of the chapters traces multiple shifting boundaries of law – as discipline, as practice, as focus of study, as form of knowledge. The two chapters that constitute the bookends to the collection frame the conversation, first introducing readers to the notion and promise of ‘stateless law’ (Sally Engle Merry’s Prologue), and finally reflecting on the consequences of ‘transnational lawyering’ for the teaching and learning of law (Peer Zumbansen’s Epilogue). In between, the four Parts of the book aim in turn to situate stateless law, to probe the potential it holds for rethinking the ‘discipline’ of law itself, to sketch the forms and aspirations of stateless law and to connect it to practice and education. This brief guide to the preoccupations and projects of the participating authors offers a snapshot of the book’s depth and breadth. Sally Engle Merry sets the stage with an overview of the relationship of stateless law to state law. As she articulates, in the contemporary world, stateless law rarely exists in isolation from state law. An exploration of their dynamic interactions can focus on stateless law before the state, outside the state or inside the state. In each instance, a careful examination of the distinctive rapport of forms and power structures of stateless law with those of state law yields important insight and paths for change. Part I, Situating Stateless Law, which takes the form of two chapters written by the book’s editors, offers a substantive introduction to the book’s parameters as suggested by the title of the collection: stateless law, boundaries and discipline. In his reflection on the disciplinarity of law, its connection to the nation-state and the possible inevitability of interdisciplinarity for legal scholarship and education, Helge Dedek addresses the layers of meaning underlying ‘discipline’ and what forces have historically played a ‘disciplining’ role in defining the teaching of law in the university setting. Through the framing device of three inaugural lectures on the study of law – by Blackstone and Dicey in England, and von Liszt in Germany – he sheds light on various institutional dynamics of discipline formation, and reflects on how stateless law challenges the discipline to depart from well-worn paths and eroded boundaries that may well obstruct the view. Focused on the particular context of legal education and pedagogy in contemporary Canada, Shauna Van Praagh suggests that a stateless law sensibility dislodges the state from its central place in recollection of the past, engagement with the present and imagination of what lies ahead. By balancing attention to the state with the incorporation of non-state structures, sources, and stories, law teachers insist that jurists understand the complexities of history in order to participate in building the future. In Part II, The ‘Discipline’ of Stateless Law, four authors offer distinct perspectives and reflections on the shape of law for students, teachers and scholars. Ernest J. Weinrib examines law as an academic discipline through the study of private law’s normative doctrine and institutional arrangements. Drawing on Kant’s Doctrine of Right for a description of the stateless dimension of private law, he illustrates the insights of transsystemic study of law through an analysis of unjust enrichment in common law and Jewish law. Hanoch J. Dagan identifies legal theory as the principal identifier of law as an academic discipline. He shows how legal theory relies on neighbouring disciplines while at the same time situating itself securely against law’s

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particular institutional and structural characteristics. The challenge of interdisciplinarity is explicitly taken up by Mátyás Bódig in his chapter. Bódig explores doctrinal knowledge and the contours of a non-instrumentalist vision of scholarship associated with law in the university. The final contribution comes from Michelle Cumyn who focuses on systematization in the context of stateless law, and insists on the importance and innovative potential of revisiting law’s methodology. Part III, Forms and Aspirations of Stateless Law, invites the reader to delve deeper into the theoretical connotations and ramifications of law beyond or in the absence of the state. Louis Assier-Andrieu traces the construction of the main branches of legal pluralism and legal culturalism, underscoring the contextual elements upon which they have been built; in so doing, he interrogates their engagement with the(ir own, distinctly, pervasively Western) state and that which lies beyond it. The difficulties – and sometimes intractability – of dichotomous thinking surface as a theme in Mark Antaki’s chapter, as well. Unpacking the language of the call for papers of the Stateless Law conference that preceded this collection, he explores the semantics of state and discipline as a path to understanding what stateless law can mean. Maxime St-Hilaire follows, issuing a trenchant statement of what stateless law cannot mean. In a sharp critique of the various theories of legal pluralism – including an introduction to the work of Santi Romano, the early-twentiethcentury Italian legal scholar who is little known in Anglophone circles – he insists upon the centrality of rule of law and its concomitant ‘minimum of … monism’ in the areas of human rights and judicial review. Shifting the focus outside the nation-state, Jaye Ellis in her chapter finds that transnational law can no longer be imagined as being inevitably subjugated by state law; she articulates the need for a new conception of governance and government that does not rest on an implicit premise of state, but that instead resorts to other means of addressing the democratic and other challenges that transnational law represents. In the final chapter of Part III, Frédéric Zenati-Castaing advocates for a reinvigorated and strongly comparative ‘legal science’ to play a prominent role in meeting those challenges. He sees in the development of transnational law a return to the fore of the millennia-old concept of ius commune, and with it, a pressing need for doctrinal scholars to take up the ‘legislative’ mantle of the state. The last section, Part IV, turns the reader’s attention to The Practice, Teaching and Learning of Stateless Law. Stephen J. Toope argues that the moral imagination crucial to shared understandings and practices of the rule of law stems from a vision of legal education in which students and teachers together explore law’s responsiveness to lived experience. Vincent Forray engages in a philosophical play on the notion of ‘faculty’ – as aptitude or capacity, and as a place of teaching and learning in the university – in order to provoke reflection on the boundaries of a faculty of law in developing the faculties of a jurist. Seán Patrick Donlan provides a historical framework for the centrality of stateless law and for the essential hybridity of law, best illustrated through the teaching and learning of comparative legal and normative history. Part IV concludes with Rosalie Jukier’s description of a pedagogical model in legal education that integrates legal traditions and systems, frees the teaching of law from jurisdictional boundaries and encourages flexible and creative thinking on the part of future jurists. Lastly, in his Epilogue, Peer Zumbansen places McGill’s ‘transsystemic’ educational programme in the larger context of the global changes facing law schools, as they struggle with new student expectations, market demands and shifting frameworks of domestic and transnational lawyering. He invites educators to emphasize the transnational, multi-faceted ‘case beneath the case’ in their teaching – that is, the contextual complexities that demand more than a solely ‘legal’ assessment, and instead necessitate historical, political, economic and cultural understanding. In this age of stateless law, the task of the legal educator is to sensitize and prepare students for the myriad of new challenges to the legal profession. Confronted with the diminishing importance of the nation-state and the parallel rise of non-state actors, legal practice is inevitably evolving, and with it legal scholarship, legal education and the very conception of law itself. Through this collection, therefore, the seventeen authors have strived to contribute to a vital discourse on the boundaries of our discipline. *** Cette œuvre reflète l’intersection de multiples communautés dont les deux coéditeurs ont le grand privilège de faire partie. First, and perhaps most obviously, the book mirrors the community of scholars from many

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countries, legal traditions and scholarly preoccupations who came together in Montreal, Canada in September 2012, for the conference on ‘Stateless Law’ that gave rise to this collection. En second lieu, ce recueil met en relief la communauté académique unique, stimulante et inspirante de la Faculté de droit de l’Université McGill. C’est une faculté au sein de laquelle des programmes de formation juridique se confrontent, se complètent, et traversent les frontières familières de la théorie, de la pratique, de l’analyse et de la pédagogie juridiques. La Faculté est l’hôte du Centre Paul-André Crépeau de droit privé et comparé et de l’Institut de droit comparé, dédiés l’un à des projets innovateurs en recherche juridique et l’autre, en outre, aux cycles supérieurs en droit. Chacun correspond à une communauté florissante qui rassemble diverses générations et qui offre des espaces d’investigation, de dialogue et de connaissance et compréhension enrichies. As co-editors of Stateless Law: Evolving Boundaries of a Discipline, we are extraordinarily fortunate to have worked with professors, researchers and students who belong to these remarkable communities. In particular, we acknowledge the inspired leadership of Lionel Smith, Director of the Paul-André Crépeau Centre for Private and Comparative Law, and of Daniel Jutras, Dean of McGill University’s Faculty of Law. Warm appreciation goes to our colleagues Kirsten Anker, Evan Fox-Decent, Victor Muñiz-Fraticelli, René Provost and Daniel Weinstock, who read, reviewed and provided constructive comments on the content of the book. The preparation of this book was marked by the sad and untimely loss of two of our McGill colleagues, Roderick A. Macdonald and H. Patrick Glenn. Scholars, teachers and visionaries, Rod Macdonald and Patrick Glenn both, in their own ways, reminded jurists to focus not on the lines that divide state law from non-state law, or one academic discipline from another, but on the constant and complicated interactions across permeable or even illusory borders. Their influence is found in the very conception of the book, in the institutional context in which it was developed and indeed throughout its content. Nous sommes redevables à Régine Tremblay, directrice adjointe, et Caroline Cassagnabère, chercheuse postdoctorale, toutes deux affiliées au Centre Crépeau en 2012–2013, pour leur dévouement enjoué et perspicace. Ensembles, elles ont fourni la «colonne vertébrale» de soutien nécessaire pour le processus de rédaction, en considérant, systématisant et révisant les contributions de ce recueil. Ce soutien bien apprécié a continué sous la houlette de Vanessa Arviset, directrice adjointe depuis l’automne 2013. En dernier lieu, nous remercions les étudiants en droit toujours engagés, enthousiastes et consciencieux qui ont complété l’équipe de rédaction: Jennifer Anderson, Sheel Chaudhuri, Kristofer Lachance et Frédérique Thibault. Nous célébrons le fait que la préparation de ce livre ait impliqué des participants tous les cycles universitaires de même que des juristes à des étapes différentes de leur carrière. We are particularly grateful to Jennifer Anderson, who supervised the final stages of the editing process, and whose contribution was essential to the success of this project. While the collection does represent the communities in which it was conceived, developed and produced, its rayonnement goes well beyond the McGill campus and the city of Montreal. This is a book that captures broad, ongoing and crucial conversations in the early part of the twenty-first century about law’s nature, forms and preoccupations. As its co-editors, we hope the collection forges new paths in our understanding, teaching and analysis of law. Those hopes are made concrete thanks to the enthusiasm and support for the project offered by Alison Kirk, Publisher at Ashgate Publishing Ltd, and by Seán Donlan, Editor of the Ashgate series Juris Diversitas. We trust that the book will find a home not only in a series devoted to the comparative and plural study of law, but on bookshelves of all those readers interested in exploring law’s relationship to other disciplines, institutional structures and social discourse. Helge Dedek and Shauna Van Praagh

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Foreword The origins of this book lie in an international conference entitled Stateless Law? The Future of the Discipline, which took place in September 2012 at the McGill University Faculty of Law, co-hosted by the Faculty and the Paul-André Crépeau Centre for Private and Comparative Law. Most of the chapters in this book began as papers presented at that conference. In 1999, McGill’s Faculty of Law instituted an innovative programme of undergraduate legal education in which students are exposed, from the very beginning of their legal education, to both the civil law and the common law. The programme combines the two Western legal traditions in a uniquely integrated fashion, with the aim of educating cosmopolitan jurists who can flourish in any setting. In the years since its adoption, the McGill programme has continued to evolve and develop. Le premier groupe d’étudiants et d’étudiantes formés au sein de ce programme a complété ses études en 2002, et l’année 2012 marquait donc le dixième anniversaire du programme de McGill. C’est entre autres pour souligner cet anniversaire que la Faculté a choisi d’organiser un événement scientifique d’envergure. A mesure que nos discussions avançaient quant au contenu de cette conférence, il est apparu que les enjeux et les questions à traiter dépassaient largement l’examen des succès et des défis du programme de McGill. L’objectif est devenu plus ambitieux : réfléchir à l’avenir de l’enseignement et de la recherche fondamentale en droit, à partir d’une grille qui émerge de la mission unique que s’est donnée McGill. Of course, questions are being asked all over the world about the future of legal scholarship and legal education. These questions are intimately tied to how academic jurists understand the nature of their discipline, including its place within the University and its relationship to the practice of law. They are also tied to the changing nature of law itself, as the monopoly traditionally held by national states on the activity of making law is itself in evolution. We wanted our tenth anniversary conference to stand as a lasting and distinctive contribution to the global academic dialogue on these fundamental issues. The outcome was a conference entitled Stateless Law? The Future of the Discipline / Le droit hors d’État: L’avenir de la discipline. There was an enthusiastic response to an international call for papers. At the conference, 39 presentations were given over two days, on a broad range of topics relating to the evolution and the future of the discipline of law. Speakers and participants came from all over the world and from all career stages. It goes without saying that a great deal of work has gone into the conference, and this volume. The conference’s organizing committee, composed of Helge Dedek, Shauna Van Praagh, and the authors of this Foreword, has many people to thank. First, we thank all of the speakers at the conference, whose energy and ideas made the event such a success. We also acknowledge the hard work of the members of the Crépeau Centre in organizing every detail of the event. These included Régine Tremblay, who was the Assistant Director of the Centre at the time of the conference, and Manon Berthiaume, the Centre’s Senior Administrative Coordinator. Caroline Cassagnabère, a postdoctoral researcher in the Centre, took on a special role in coordinating the conference and made an enormous contribution. For essential financial support, we thank Dr Rose Goldstein, McGill University’s Vice-Principal (Research and International Relations). Moreover, the undersigned acknowledge the efforts of our colleagues, Professors Dedek and Van Praagh, in carrying forward the momentum from the conference and turning it into this outstanding collection of scholarly essays. The chapters in this book will give the reader some idea of the fascinating exchange of ideas that took place over two days in the autumn of 2012. We hope that it will nourish further reflection on the future of legal education and the discipline of law. Lionel Smith Director, Paul-André Crépeau Centre for Private and Comparative Law, Faculty of Law, McGill University

Daniel Jutras Dean, Faculty of Law, McGill University

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Prologue

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Chapter 1

Stateless Law: Before, Inside and Outside the Law of the State

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Sally Engle Merry

Understanding how stateless law works is an important challenge given its widespread and diverse manifestations and its importance in social regulation at local, national and global levels. It is a form of law in which the social context is as important as the text. Stateless law does not fit easily into established modes of understanding state law. Human rights law, for example, is widely viewed as less like law than domestic law because its enforcement systems are less robust. Yet, scholars who write about how human rights law works in practice provide valuable insights into what it does and how it makes a difference. They focus on analysing the social processes of human rights activism from global conferences to grassroots social movements. They understand that the creation of human rights conventions and treaty monitoring processes is embedded within a wider network of civil society organizations, intergovernmental organizations and states. Studies of human rights in practice reveal the power of civil society to identify problems, collect data about them, develop media campaigns to disseminate this information to wider publics and generate pressures for change. These studies trace campaigns such as the critique of female genital cutting, which stretches over one hundred years, or the social movement to define mass ethnic killing as genocide. Such campaigns typically incorporate national and international laws as well as the mobilization of public concern. They examine stateless law in context. These social and cultural processes are fundamental to recognizing the way all law, not just human rights law, works. In general, laws are passed because they respond to social concerns and issues; they are enforced when society, or at least its leaders, thinks some form of behaviour is a problem. If governing sexuality seems critical, for example, adultery will be prosecuted. When a strong social movement insists that domestic violence is a serious violation, assaults inside the family will receive firmer treatment from the law. On the other hand, laws passed to deal with problems that were important in the past but no longer seem serious, such as fornication, languish unenforced on the books. Thinking about the effects of society on state law adds uncertainty and unpredictability to its analysis, yet it also offers a more accurate understanding of the way law acts in society. Stateless forms of law range from the informal but clear rules of criminal organizations to the regulatory processes of small-scale societies to the ways the international human rights system monitors state behaviour. In the contemporary world, stateless law rarely exists in isolation from state law, so that the critical questions we need to address concern the nature of the interactions between them. In most cases, this is an interaction of steeply unequal power, with state law exercising far more power than stateless law. Yet, stateless law is also grounded in its own forms of power, whether criminal networks or local norms and disputing practices. It is typically shaped by sociologically and culturally based forms of power constituted by distinct cultural worlds, systems of understanding, and political and institutional structures. It is possible to differentiate stateless law into three types: before, outside and inside the state. Each type has a distinctive relationship to state law. The first type is stateless law before the state. Stateless law existed before states did. For thousands of years before states emerged, societies found ways to regulate themselves. A wealth of anthropological research reveals the extent to which societies without states develop shared norms and manage conflicts through processes such as mediation, negotiation and decisions by chiefs and religious leaders that we might call arbitration. As Bronislaw Malinowski demonstrated long ago, even in the absence of any third party, a great deal of social regulation takes place through reciprocity. Those who fail to return gifts are excluded from future gift giving. The need to maintain relations of exchange provides a powerful incentive to return gifts in a way that is socially accepted as fair and balanced. Thus, in the absence

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of any formal legal processes or institutions, the need to maintain social relationships serves to produce lawabiding behaviour.1 In another famous example, E.E. Evans-Pritchard describes the legal life of the Nuer nomadic herdsmen of the Sudan who settle their disputes over murder because of the threat of violence if murderers do not pay compensation to the family of the bereaved.2 Although this community has no formal authorities, there is a ritual chief whose curse is a source of fear and encourages those who might wish to fight to settle instead. Vengeance can be averted by the payment of an appropriate number of cattle. These forms of stateless law pre-dated states and provided a form of regulation of everyday life and a constraint on behaviour. Even after the emergence of states, much of the world continued to live in social groupings not governed by states and state law. The spread of state law into most of the world occurred initially through the formation of city states, then the creation of empires, and finally and more extensively between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries as a product of nationalism and imperialism. Stateless law exists not only before states developed, but also outside existing states. Once states were created and their legal systems put into place, spaces continued to exist in which state law failed to penetrate. Examples of such spaces are those controlled by illegal criminal organizations, terrorist and secessionist groups, smuggling rings in border zones where state law does not reach, and international systems of law that stretch above states, such as human rights law. At the fringes of some states there are communities only marginally under state control, often with their own sets of norms about how to behave. For example, in her analysis of trade in the Chad Basin, Janet Roitman describes routine practices of illegality: thieves dressing as customs agents who extract bribes, traders who smuggle goods across borders, members of the local community who follow informal rules about how to bribe and avoid government discovery.3 In another example, nomadic peoples are often governed by their own standards and systems of conflict resolution, outside the control of states. It is common for states to seek to settle and control such populations, whether they are herders or hunters and gatherers. Historically, the rise of nation-states and imperialism have meant the gradual extension of state control into more remote and marginal areas. Another form of stateless law outside the state is international law and the human rights system. This system is part of a regime of multi-lateral treaties, agreed standards and guidelines, transnational organizations and their regulatory systems, and bilateral agreements. This form of stateless law has some intriguing similarities with village law. For example, the term ‘customary international law’, which describes widely established but unenforced principles such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, evokes the kind of law that regulates village life outside states. The importance of threats to reputation, informal pressures and shaming to the enforcement of human rights suggests another parallel with stateless law in small-scale communities. Third, stateless law exists inside states in organizations that maintain their own codes of conduct and judicial systems, such as universities and companies. States also create semi-autonomous communities entitled to act outside state control and to exercise jurisdiction over their members, such as First Nations communities. In the past, there were pockets of non-state law in company towns or in colonial spaces governed by large companies such as the British East India Company. More recently, the creation of special economic zones in which states allow corporations and universities to operate and impose taxes outside state regulation represent a new iteration of the old pattern. Many societies have pockets in cities or rural areas that are impervious to state law, appearing lawless but in practice governed by alternative codes of law and mechanisms of enforcement. Thus, there are many kinds of stateless law inside states. In each type of stateless law, there are important interactions with state law. Except for the period before there was state law, by and large stateless law exists in contexts defined, even at a distance, by some form of state law. The form and content of stateless law is shaped by its interaction with the state, whether by adoption 1 Bronislaw Malinowski, Crime and Custom in Savage Society (New Jersey: Littlefield, Adams, 1926). 2 EE Evans-Pritchard, The Nuer: A Description of the Modes of Livelihood and Political Institutions of a Nilotic People (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1940). 3 Janet Roitman, “The Garrison-Entrepot: A Mode of Governing in the Chad Basin” in Aihwa Ong & Stephen J Collier, eds, Global Assemblages: Technology, Politics, and Ethics as Anthropological Problems (Malden, Mass: Blackwell, 2005) 417; Janet Roitman, “The Ethics of Illegality in the Chad Basin” in Jean Comaroff & John L Comaroff, eds, Law and Disorder in the Postcolony (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006) 247.

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or resistance. On the other hand, stateless law also affects state law. The way state law operates depends on how it manages the stateless law outside and within it and how it handles encounters with peoples who lack state law. Thus, understanding the messy and unreliable social world in which stateless law exists, in its multiple instantiations, is essential to analysing the way state law works.

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Part I Introduction: Situating Stateless Law

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Chapter 2

Stating Boundaries: The Law, Disciplined

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Helge Dedek*

I. Introduction This book is about the challenge that contemplating law without the state – stateless law1 – poses to the law as a ‘university discipline’, law as it is studied and taught by academics in the institutional context of higher education. Globalization and internationalization are challenging the boundaries of the ‘discipline’; with the nation-state waning in importance as the ultimate reference point for jurisdictional demarcation lines, it is also being called into question as an intellectual paradigm of legal scholarship and legal education. The insecurity this phenomenon brings is well known and has been discussed frequently as part of a larger discourse on the (troubled) identity of law as a university discipline, a discourse revolving around two opposing claims: first, that it is possible to pinpoint a disciplinary proprium of legal scholarship, and second, that legal scholarship is only conceivable as an interdisciplinary enterprise.2 This book is therefore a contribution to a conversation that is by no means novel. An abundance of erudite scholarship has been produced on the difficulties in defining law’s claim to disciplinarity. The disputes triggered by the manifold challenges levelled throughout the past century cannot be considered settled. Instead, many sub-disciplinary discourses have developed theoretical, methodological and epistemological frameworks defining their perspective on the disciplinarity of law. Conversations on this contentious issue between scholars of different sub-disciplines and schools have become rare. In the conference that gave rise to this collection, we sought to create a forum for a variety of possible answers to our thematic challenge – and to revitalize the conversation across the boundaries of theoretical affiliations and labels. By means of introduction, I wish to add to this conversation a historical and comparative voice. When we reflect on the disciplinarity of law, its connection to the nation-state and the possible inevitability of interdisciplinarity for legal scholarship and education, the obvious first question we have to address is: what is a discipline? The inquiry into this question leads us back to the nineteenth century, when the university in the Western world came into its modern form and also developed, through a process of professionalization and specialization of the academic field, the modern concept of disciplinarity. How did law as a subject taught at the universities relate to this process – and how did it change during this process? The institutional dynamics in the formative period of discipline-formation in the nineteenth century put pressure on the academic legal discourse to define itself as a distinctive ‘discipline’, that is, an area of scholarship that could be distinguished from others, in particular philosophy, and that would also be able to live up to the modern standards of ‘scientificity’. While thus under pressure to show that law, as a science rather than a mere craft, indeed deserved its place in the modernized institution of the university, the discipline of academic law also had to react to mounting pressure from an increasingly professionalized bar and regulating state, and justify to them that this academic, ‘scientific’ education would be superior to other models of training lawyers. Both factors, I posit, contributed to the positivistic turn in legal thought in the early nineteenth century. Law distinguished itself from other disciplines by its object of inquiry, that is, by focusing no longer on natural law, but exclusively on the positive law of the nation-state. It could lay claim to a specific set of * I wish to thank Jennifer Anderson, Mark Antaki, Louis Assier-Andrieu, Mireille Fournier and Peer Zumbansen for their helpful comments. 1 See, in the present volume, the prologue by Sally Engle Merry, “Stateless Law: Before, Inside and Outside the Law of the State”, ch 1. 2 See, in the present volume, Ernest J Weinrib, “Back to the Future”, ch 4; Hanoch Dagan, “Law as an Academic Discipline”, ch 5. 1

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methods of conceptualizing and ordering doctrine: ‘legal science’. In the process of establishing itself as a discipline, law restricted itself to what it considered an appropriate object – it disciplined itself, if you will, and in its restriction to positive law3 gave up the claim of being a ‘science which distinguishes the criterions of right and wrong’, as Blackstone had still described it only a few years earlier.4 At the same time, it was postulated that the new approach to the positive law of a given jurisdiction would be useful or even indispensable for the practising lawyer or jurist in an increasingly complex legal reality; the argument was that legal education could not be simply about mastering the entirety of materials and sources, but must necessarily be concerned with acquiring a method for making sense of the unruly and ever-growing mass that constituted the law. This was supposed to be the ‘added value’ that only university-based legal education could offer – the selling point when justifying university-based education to the profession and the state’s regulatory bodies. Probably the best-known attempt to capture the significance of nineteenth-century ‘legal science’ is a body of work produced by authors who are mostly interested in the theoretical, ideological and political underpinnings of what they label ‘Classical Legal Thought’ (CLT).5 I am not questioning the insights of this scholarship, but intend instead to shed some light on the institutional dynamics of discipline-formation, a process whose contribution to the creation of the nineteenth-century legal science paradigm has remained rather unexplored. These institutional factors, I believe, contributed significantly to the formation of a formalist and nation-state-centred paradigm of CLT. However, besides making a historical point, I wish us to remind ourselves that beyond establishing a replaceable paradigm in the Kuhnian sense, these factors have defined the law’s very claim to disciplinarity – an insight that helps us better understand why the discrediting of the ‘legal science’ paradigm was able to shake the identity of the ‘discipline’ to its core and brought about a crisis that has lasted ever since. As scholars, we might have personally answered the challenge of the identity crisis by choosing a theoretical affiliation that transcends the often-ridiculed limitations of the paradigms of CLT. But how were we able to respond to the challenge as legal educators? In civilian jurisdictions such as Germany, current statutes regulating legal education openly stipulate the goal of a ‘scientific’ education that allows the practitioner and judge to work according to ‘scientific’ standards.6 Yet even in the common law world, where the nineteenth-century doctrinal paradigm of ‘legal science’ has been more openly challenged or, as in the US, even entirely abandoned, the persistent7 claim that the added value of law school training lies in a discipline-specific ‘lawyer-like thinking’ perpetuates for legal education what has been long since lost in legal scholarship: a claim to a proprium of legal instruction at the university level,8 and thus, simultaneously, a claim to disciplinary identity and a justification of law taught at the university. The persistent claim that law schools teach students to ‘think like a lawyer’ echoes the sales pitch that ‘legal science’ was for Langdell, for Dicey and for the German Pandectists. This observation also indicates that we might be bound more tightly to the justificatory patterns of the past than we realize, given how they seem to be inscribed in the institutional matrix of the ‘discipline’. That said, within the constraints dictated by the nature of this forum, I will not be able to do the topic justice. In the short vignette that follows, I simply wish to roughly outline some of my points and illustrate them with a few examples. 3 And, on the ‘top floor’ as Radbruch called it, a ‘philosophy of positive law’: Gustav Radbruch, Rechtsphilosophie, 3d ed (Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot, 1932) at 20. 4 William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England: Book the First (Oxford, Clarendon Press: 1765) at 27 [Blackstone, Commentaries, vol 1]. 5 See e.g. Duncan Kennedy, “Three Globalizations of Law and Legal Thought: 1850–2000” in David M Trubek & Alvaro Santos, eds, The New Law and Economic Development: A Critical Appraisal (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006) 19 at 25ff. The globalization of CLT as a ’legal consciousness’ is the first of the three globalizations. See also Duncan Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of Classical Legal Thought (Washington DC: Beard Books, 2006). 6 See Helge Dedek, “Recht an der Universität: ‘Wissenschaftlichkeit’ der Juristenausbildung in Nordamerika” (2009) 64 Juristenzeitung 540 [Dedek, “Universität”]. 7 See e.g. John O Mudd, “Thinking Critically about ‘Thinking Like a Lawyer’” (1983) 33 J Legal Educ 704; Emily Calhoun, “Thinking Like A Lawyer” (1984) 34 J Legal Educ 507; Nancy B Rapoport, “Is ‘Thinking Like a Lawyer’ Really What We Want to Teach?” (2002) 1 Journal of the Association of Legal Writing Directors 91. 8 Frederick Schauer, Thinking Like A Lawyer: A New Introduction to Legal Reasoning (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2009) at 2ff.

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II. Law-As-Discipline

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A. ‘Disciplines’ and Academia What is a ‘discipline’? The Latin terms disciplina, doctrina and scientia all belong to a semantic field related to the process, substance and result of transmitting knowledge.9 While in this triad disciplina seems to emphasize the perspective of the student (the discipulus), in medieval Latin the word was used in an academic context as synonymous with the established subjects of learning themselves, particularly the liberal arts, and even as synonymous with knowledge/science as such.10 However, in its modern sense, the ‘scientific discipline’ – a concept that, in the words of sociologist Rudolf Stichweh, ‘functions as a unit of structure formation in the social system of science, … as a subject domain for teaching and learning in schools, and finally as the designation of occupational and professional roles’ – only came into its own in the nineteenth century.11 If we adopt this understanding of ‘discipline’, law as an academic or ‘scientific’ discipline is a rather recent phenomenon – a fact that, while not surprising with regard to the academic teaching of the common law, might at first seem counter-intuitive in view of the long-standing tradition of teaching law in the universities of continental Europe. Yet as we shall see, the differentiation of academia into separate units that aimed to clearly define and distinguish themselves had an impact on the selfdefinition of law as a discipline – even on the continent. This period of disciplinary consolidation saw the construction of major boundaries that continue to condition (and obstruct) academic legal discourse across both Western traditions, if only subcutaneously. It was in this context of searching for the identity of a ‘discipline’ that the academic treatment of law separated itself from the philosophical ‘speculation’ of natural law, turning instead to positive law and thus inevitably to the law of the nation-state.12 The ascent of the positivist, nation-state-centred paradigm of legal scholarship and the formation of law as an academic discipline went hand in hand. B. Science, System-Building and the Separation of Disciplines The process of disciplinary differentiation was precipitated and influenced by a multitude of factors. These included institutional factors,13 among them the professionalization of higher education, which established clear career paths for academics, in turn enabling an ever-growing degree of specialization, and also the concretization of discipline-specific discourses through narrowly focused means of communication such as scholarly journals.14 Another important factor is that at the same time that ‘disciplines’ in the modern sense were beginning to form, the understanding of scientia, science, was similarly undergoing change.  9 Joseph J Kockelmans, “Science and Discipline: Some Historical and Critical Reflections” in Joseph J Kockelmans, ed, Interdisciplinarity and Higher Education (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1979) 11 at 12ff; Stephan Meier-Oeser, sub verbo “Wissenschaft” in Joachim Ritter, ed, Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie (Basel: Schwabe, 2005) vol 12, col 51190, 51191f; Gabriel Jüssen & Gangolf Schrimpf, sub verbis “disciplina”, “doctrina” in ibid., vol 2, col 257. 10 For details, see Gabriel Jüssen & Gangolf Schrimpf, sub verbo “disciplina” in ibid., vol 2, col 258 (giving examples from Thierry of Chartres and Thomas Aquinas). 11 Rudolf Stichweh, sub verbo “scientific disciplines, history of” in NJ Smelser & PB Baltes, eds, International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences (Oxford: Elsevier Science, 2001) at 13727. More definitions are offered by Wolfram W Swoboda, “Disciplines and Interdisciplinarity: A Historical Perspective” in Joseph J Kockelmans, ed, Interdisciplinarity and Higher Education (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1979) 49 at 51ff. 12 The historical positivism of the German Historical School is an exception only insofar as it does not focus on statutory law as posited law but rather on law as organically grown; it rejects, however, the notion of natural law and explicitly focuses on the law that, through custom, becomes the law of the land and is culturally identified as ‘German’. (Note that ‘Germany’ at the time existed only as an ideal or even myth, and that a nation-state was not to form for decades to come. At the core of this myth was the idea of a German people, a Volk; see, for example, Helga Schultz, “Frühformen des Nationalismus in Deutschland” (1996) 263 Historische Zeitschrift 31). 13 Swoboda, supra note 11 at 58ff, 79. 14 Stichweh, supra note 11 at 13728f; for much more detail, see Rudolf Stichweh, Zur Entstehung des modernen Systems wissenschaftlicher Disziplinen (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1984) at 31ff.

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Moving away from a ‘habitual’ concept of scientia – i.e., scientia as the habitus of the scholar – science or Wissenschaft now began to be understood as systems of knowledge that were perceived as external,15 almost reified objects of inquiry, a tendency that was underlined by the increased use of metaphors of space (to be mapped) or edifices (to be designed and constructed, and hopefully found to be structurally sound). On the continent, where law had been established as one of the ‘higher’ faculties for centuries, a ‘habitual’ concept of legal learning – the legal scholar as jurisprude – was replaced by the ‘scientific’ paradigm: the legal scholar as legal scientist.16 To assert itself within the university, a discipline has to prove itself as a science capable of proper, systematic ordering of a specific field of knowledge. All these factors increase the pressure towards a discursive closure within the confines of the consolidating disciplines. Discipline-formation is thus a process of delineation – a creation of boundaries. In legal academia, this development was mirrored epistemologically by theories that searched and defined a specifically legal science, characterized by its own specific methods and its own specific object of inquiry. We observe how legal academia began to turn to itself for answers, even with regard to foundational questions. In particular, legal academia was careful to distance itself from philosophical academia, which, in its own drive towards consolidation, underwent a similar process of professionalization and ‘scientification’. Much like law, philosophy was not an empirical science and therefore was faced with the troubling question of how to justify its claim to being a true or ‘strict’ science, a question famously elaborated on by Kant, Fichte and many others.17 In demarcating its territory, legal academia willingly gave up some of its former ‘possessions’. In particular, the discourse on natural law and natural rights was sacrificed, a discourse that until the nineteenth century had been synonymous with legal philosophy and had been characterized by the inclusion of jurists and philosophers alike as a truly trans- or – more accurately – as a pre-disciplinary form of discourse. In the nineteenth century, we witness across Europe the development of a paradigm of legal scholarship that instead admonished the jurist to refrain from philosophical ‘speculation’.18 In its place and later in the century, after an interlude of philosophical abstinence, the ‘discipline’ of law created its own sub-discipline of legal philosophy, expounded by jurists for jurists, without having to cross the new disciplinary boundaries; its first effort was the development of a ‘philosophy of positive law’.19

15 Meier-Oeser, supra note 9 at 51210f; see also Jan Schröder, Wissenschaftstheorie und Lehre der ‚praktischen Jurisprudenz’ auf deutschen Universitäten an der Wende zum 19. Jahrhundert (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1979) at 15ff. 16 Schröder, ibid. at 36ff; in German usage, Rechtsgelahrtheit and Rechtsgelehrsamkeit were replaced by Rechtswissenschaft, which remains the label by which legal academia refers to itself in German-speaking countries, in contrast to the term ‘legal science’, which has fallen out of use in the English-speaking world. On this cultural difference, see Dedek, “Universität”, supra note 6. 17 On this debate, see e.g. Daniel Breazeale, “Between Kant and Fichte: Karl Leonhard Reinhold’s ‘Elementary Philosophy’” (1982) 35:4 Review of Metaphysics 785 at 791ff (giving an overview of the discussion on systematization and of the work of Reinhold, a lesser-known philosopher in the Kantian vein). For a modern perspective, see Sven O Hansson, “Philosophy and Other Disciplines” (2008) 39:4–5 Metaphilosophy 472 at 473ff (also elaborating on the semantic and cultural differences between the English term ‘science’ and the German ‘Wissenschaft’). 18 C.f. Karl Bergbohm, Jurisprudenz und Rechtsphilosophie: Kritische Abhandlungen (Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot, 1892) vol 1 at 12ff; note that in the German legal discourse, the word ‘speculation’ is mostly used to signify idealist philosophy in the Hegelian vein. It is interesting that Dicey uses ‘speculative’ synonymously with ‘philosophical’ when he commends Austin’s merits regarding ‘the speculative study of law’, that is, Austin’s ‘philosophy of positive law’: see Albert V Dicey, “The Study of Jurisprudence” (1880) 5 Law Magazine & Review: A Quarterly Review of Jurisprudence and Quarterly Digest of All Reported Cases (5th ser) 382 at 386 [Dicey, “Jurisprudence”]. 19 On this expression, see John Austin, Lectures on Jurisprudence or The Philosophy of Positive Law, 3d ed by Robert Campbell (London: John Murray, 1869) vol 1 at 32f (explaining that he borrowed the expression from Gustav Hugo, Lehrbuch des Naturrechts, Als einer Philosophie des Positiven Rechts, 4th ed (Berlin: August Mylius, 1819)). For a summary of the development towards a philosophy of positive law in English and German jurisprudence, see also Bergbohm, supra note 18 at 26f.

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C. (Self-)Disciplining and the ‘Correct Means of Training’ This self-imposed restriction for the sake of discipline-formation is, one might say, an instance of selfdisciplining.20 It is, of course, impossible not to reflect on the ambiguity of the word ‘discipline’: we always sense its implication of admonition, sanction, of ‘discipline and punish’. This linguistic ambiguity at the crossroads of power and knowledge helps us explore further dimensions of the fragmentation of knowledge creation and transmission through the pigeonholing of the professionalized and bureaucratized academic ‘discipline’ structures: the disciplining of the mind through the creation of disciplinary rules on proper topics, methodology and arguments, and, importantly, the disciplining of our trust. By the latter, I refer to how disciplinary modes of knowledge production also define the parameters of the credentials and thus the trustworthiness of any speaker;21 s/he who ventures beyond the disciplinary boundaries or even tries to partake in the discourse of the discipline from the outside is easily dismissed. Not unlike military discipline, academic disciplines generate a sense of ‘how things are supposed to be done’, traditions that are mostly adhered to without questioning, forming part of a disciplinary habitus, which in turn creates a strong sense of identity. Regarding disciplining through education, through ‘the means of correct training’,22 Foucault himself identified the culmination of control in the establishment of regular and formalized examinations in the late eighteenth century.23 While Foucault did not take the exploration of the twofold meaning of ‘discipline’ very far in Discipline and Punish,24 the importance of standardized examinations in higher education and their relation to the formation of academic disciplines has been recognized since.25 Indeed, it seems obvious that an institutionalized system of examination practices in law would feed back into the definition of the body of knowledge into which law professors are supposed to initiate their students – and, since this teaching is supposed to be grounded in research, into the very definition of legal scholarship. At the same time, such examination practices engrain expectations as to what amounts to the ‘esoteric knowledge’26 that students must master in order to enter the ‘profession’; the impact on the definition of the ‘discipline’ is again twofold, since the expectations of the profession affect legal academia as well. A paradigmatic example of such a feedback mechanism is the German State Examination, a long-standing tradition of comprehensive, stateadministered exams that heavily emphasize doctrinal knowledge; this practice has engendered a culture that measures the ‘quality’ of a jurist almost exclusively by the results s/he achieved on the State Examination, and it has therefore produced mind-boggling degrees of doctrinal erudition while at the same time marginalizing non-doctrinal forms of legal scholarship.27 This example also highlights another idiosyncrasy of the academic ‘discipline’ of law. As a course of study leading to a qualification required to enter into the services of the state bureaucracy as a magistrate or other official (particularly in Continental jurisdictions such as France or Germany) or to enter into the legal profession (the practice of which is typically heavily regulated), the discipline’s training standards and examination procedures are imposed on it from the outside, either immediately by the state (as in the case of the German State Examination) or slightly more remotely by the professional organizations (bar associations, law societies, etc.) that are entrusted by the state with the maintenance and supervision of professional standards. These practices of disciplining legal academia from the outside – on the continent as of the late eighteenth 20 A self-disciplining that, at the turn from the eighteenth to the nineteenth century, had important political implications, of course: the withdrawal from the discourse on natural rights and the turn to philosophical quietism were also a reaction to the trauma of the French Revolution. 21 Roderick Macdonald, “Transdisciplinarity and Trust” in Margaret A Somerville & David J Rapport, eds, Transdisciplinarity: ReCreating Integrated Knowledge (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2002) 61 at 71. 22 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, translated by Alan Sharidan (New York: Vintage Books, 1977) 170 at 170ff. 23 Ibid. at 184ff. 24 Jan Goldstein, “Foucault among the Sociologists: The ‘Disciplines’ and the History of the Professions” (1984) 23:2 History and Theory 170 at 179. 25 See Keith Hoskin & Richard H Macve, “Accounting and the Examination: A Genealogy of Disciplinary Power” (1986) 11:2 Accounting, Organizations and Society 105 at 132ff; Keith Hoskin, “The Examination, Disciplinary Power, and Rational Schooling” (1979) 8:2 Journal of the History of Education Society 21 at 21ff; Goldstein, supra note 24 at 178ff. 26 On this definition, see Goldstein, ibid. at 174f. 27 See Dedek, “Universität”, supra note 6.

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century, in England as of the mid-nineteenth century – played a significant role as early as in the initial, neuralgic phase of discipline-formation, which was thus characterized from the outset by a combination of voluntary self-restraint (and hence self-disciplining) and of restraints and demands from the outside, i.e. disciplining by the state or its subsidiaries. Therefore, inscribed in the self-perception of the consolidating discipline from its beginnings was the paradoxical relationship to the state and the profession that remains characteristic of legal academia to this day: on the one hand, its indignant reactions to disciplining from the outside and to the common misconceptions of the academic realm by practitioners and regulators; on the other hand, its submissive gesture of justifying its existence on the grounds that only university-based legal education is capable of providing the ‘correct means of training’ for the practice of law. Let us look at two examples of legal scholars describing, defending and justifying the endeavour of a university-based legal education. III. Two Inaugural Lectures: From Blackstone to Dicey A. Blackstone: ‘A Science which Distinguishes the Criterions of Right and Wrong’ In October 1758, William Blackstone gave his inaugural lecture as the first Vinerian Professor of the Laws of England. In his lecture, entitled ‘On the Study of the Law’ – published as a monograph28 and more widely popularized by its inclusion as an introductory chapter in the Commentaries on the Laws of England 29 – Blackstone elaborated on the difficult task with which he had been charged: the introduction of the common law into the university curriculum. The idea that the common law could be taught in this way was an innovation, for until the establishment of the Vinerian Chair, only Canon and Roman Law had been taught at the English universities.30 Mr Charles Viner, in his will and testament, had devised funds to the chancellor, masters and scholars of Oxford University to be applied to establish a ‘professorship of the common law’, and he had further specified that to put it on proper foot, … young gentlemen who shall be students there, and shall intend to apply themselves to the study of the common laws of England, may be instructed and enabled to pursue their studies to their best advantage afterwards when they shall attend the courts at Westminster; and not to trifle away their time there in hearing what they understand nothing of, and thereupon perhaps divert their thoughts from the law away to their pleasures.31

The professor to be elected, Viner stipulated, was to be not just a ‘barrister at the common law’ but also ‘at least’ a Master of Arts or a Bachelor of Civil Law at Oxford University.32 Blackstone met this ‘transsystemic’ requirement: a barrister at Middle Temple, he also held the degree of Bachelor and, as of 1750, of Doctor of Civil Law.33 Yet even for a jurist whose personal experience bridged the divide between academic study of (Roman) law and the professional practice of the (common) law, establishing the common law as a subject of academic study was a daunting task. Blackstone admitted to his trepidation, given the ill reputation of the study of common law as being ‘(however unjustly) of a dry and unfruitful nature’ and the fact that ‘elementary parts’ 28 William Blackstone, A Discourse on the Study of the Law; Being an Introductory Lecture, read in the Public Schools, October XXV, M.DCC.LVIII (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1758) [Blackstone, Discourse]. 29 Blackstone, Commentaries, vol 1, supra note 4 at 3–37. Note: I will cite to the version of the Discourse included in the Commentaries because the latter work is generally more easily accessible. 30 Harold Grenville Hanbury, The Vinerian Chair and Legal Education (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1958) at 1ff. 31 “Postscript” in Blackstone, Discourse, supra note 28 at 35. 32 Ibid. at 36. 33 Wilfrid Prest, William Blackstone: Law and Letters in the Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008) at 61ff, 96. Prest emphasizes that there is insufficient historical evidence available to allow an assessment of the intensity of Blackstone’s actual exposure to the civil law.

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had so far only ‘received a very moderate share of cultivation’.34 However, Blackstone elaborated, ‘[t]he science thus committed to his charge, to be cultivated, methodized and explained in the course of academical lectures’,35 the ‘science which distinguishes the criterions of right and wrong’,36 very much deserved to be included in the canon of university education. According to Blackstone, the young landed gentleman, in particular, was surprisingly lacking in his knowledge of the common law – a deficiency unthinkable in civil law jurisdictions on the continent or even in Scotland, where ‘it is difficult to meet a person of liberal education, who is destitute of a competent knowledge in that science, which is to be the guardian of his natural rights and the rule of his civil conduct’.37 Thus Blackstone tried to appeal to the expectations of his audience. We notice the repeated characterization of law as science, the focus on order, taxonomy and system-building. We also notice that this science still lays claim to what would nowadays be considered the realm of the philosophical discipline of ethics: law as a science that ‘distinguishes the criterions of right and wrong’. This claim is closely connected to the way in which Blackstone explains the utility of studying the common law at the university: it behoves a gentleman to study law as a matter of padeia, of Bildung – in effect, of good breeding. However, styling legal education as a matter of ‘polite education’38 has another dimension: that politeness not only denoted polished manners but, due to a semantic development in the eighteenth century, also evoked ideas of political virtue.39 This points in the direction of a far more instrumentalist aspect of Blackstone’s argument: unlike the study of Roman law, which also might be studied simply because it belongs to the canon of classic humanistic knowledge, the study of the national common law was additionally a matter of civic responsibility. Recent scholarship on Blackstone has aimed to show that his vision of legal education at the university level was already aimed at the improvement of professional legal education,40 despite his apparent championing of a ‘liberal science’ over a ‘professional art’.41 As observed by historian Paul Lucas,42 Blackstone emphasized that it would be ‘a matter of very public concern’ to ‘have the interpretation and enforcement of laws … fall wholly in the hands of obscure and illiterate men’.43 B. Dicey: Reduction to a ‘Clear, Logical, Symmetrical Form’ As we know, Blackstone’s worry regarding the future of academic legal education was not unwarranted. Integrating legal education into the university turned out to be a struggle: the curricula and chairs emerged slowly and not in great numbers, legal training was mainly a matter of apprenticeship, and concern with the generally deplorable state of legal education led to two critical government reports and the introduction of professional examination requirements from the 1860s onwards.44 When A.V. Dicey delivered his inaugural lecture as Vinerian Professor in 1883, more than a hundred years after Blackstone’s lecture, it was still ominously entitled ‘Can English Law Be Taught at the Universities?’45 The matter, it would appear, had not yet been settled. 34 Blackstone, Commentaries, vol 1, supra note 4 at 3. 35 Ibid. at 4. 36 Ibid. at 27. 37 Ibid. at 4. 38 Ibid. at 6. 39 See Lawrence E Klein, “Liberty, Manners, and Politeness in Early Eighteenth-Century England” (1989) 32:3 The Historical Journal 583. 40 See e.g. David Lemmings, “Blackstone and Law Reform by Education: Preparation for the Bar and Lawyerly Culture in Eighteenth-Century England” (1998) 16:2 LHR 211 at 215. 41 Paul Lucas, “Blackstone and the Reform of the Legal Profession” (1962) 77:304 English Historical Review 456. 42 Ibid. 43 Blackstone, Commentaries, vol 1, supra note 4 at 32ff. 44 See e.g. Andrew Boon & Julian Webb, “Legal Education in England and Wales: Back to the Future?” (2008) 58:1 J Legal Educ 79 at 85ff; see also Peter Stein, “Legal Theory and the Reform of Legal Education in Mid-Nineteenth Century England” in Alessandro Giuliani & Nicola Picardi, eds, L’Educazione giuridica, vol 2: Profili storici (Perugia: Università degli Studi di Perugia, 1979) 185. 45 Albert V Dicey, Can English Law Be Taught at the Universities? An Inaugural Lecture, Delivered at All Souls College, April 21st, 1883 (London: Macmillan, 1883) [Dicey, English Law].

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In Dicey’s lecture, the rhetorical focus shifted entirely from the educated gentleman to the professional lawyer. Dicey built his argument on the benefits of a university-based legal education for the profession; the very justification of the project of teaching law at the universities completely depended on it. While at the time, law was still widely regarded as ‘a practical subject, like plumbing, and best learnt in practice’,46 Dicey hoped to demonstrate that legal science had a significant contribution to make to the education of lawyers.47 Only a scientific treatment of the law would equip future practitioners with the necessary knowledge of the law. The attempt to study an ever-growing mass of disparate legal materials by apprenticeship (‘reading in chambers’) generated knowledge that was, inevitably ‘fragmentary’, ‘unsystematic’ and ‘wasteful of time and labour’; the fact that the apprentice had to study the legal materials necessary to grasp the problems with which he was confronted ‘rob[bed] the learner of half the gains which he ought to derive from the invaluable experience to be gained by the observation of practice’.48 Very much like Blackstone,49 Dicey saw the value of university education in its pedagogical ordering and systematization. Dicey explicitly connected the virtues of pedagogical exposition to the nature of legal scholarship: Throughout this lecture, it will be observed, no contrast has been drawn between the functions of a professor as a teacher, and his duties by way of investigation, research, or authorship … . The process indeed of teaching and re-teaching elementary doctrines to a necessarily ignorant class involves some waste of labour. Exposition (it may be said with truth) is not erudition. … At any rate, the qualities which ought to distinguish academical teaching of law – the habit of looking at our subject as a whole, the desire to define and (with a constant eye however to received authorities and to actual facts) simplify legal ideas and conceptions, the effort is to reduce law to a series of propositions which are both intelligible and in correspondence with the decisions of the court and the opinions of practising lawyers – these qualities are all fostered by the necessity for clear and effective exposition of actual law, and are also characteristics which ought to be found in authors who wish to produce monumental works of legal literature.50

With this more aggressive sales pitch to the profession – the claim that university education is actually less ‘wasteful’ and more efficient than the apprenticeship model – one important aspect of Blackstone’s more ‘liberal’ ideal of legal education disappeared: the science that informs legal education was no longer a science ‘which distinguishes the criterions of right and wrong’. While Blackstone aimed to order and clarify legal materials, he also sought to establish the consonance of the common law (in perhaps too apologetic a fashion)51 with an order of natural rights, drawing heavily on authors such as Grotius, Pufendorf and Locke.52 Dicey’s legal science, by contrast, was restricted to the formal elucidation of the ‘actual law’, that is, to a jurisprudence of concepts that regarded the reduction of law to a ‘series of propositions’ as a recipe for the production of ‘monumental [!] works of scholarship’ – thus proposing, in his emphasis on ‘clear, logical, and symmetrical form’,53 a paradigm of almost scholastic formalism.54 46 David Sugarman, “Making Respected Gentlemen out of Law Professors: A Commentary on Albert Venn Dicey, Can English Law Be Taught at the Universities (1883)” in Isabella Löhr, Matthias Middell & Hannes Siegrist, eds, Kultur und Beruf in Europa (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 2012) 161. 47 Dicey, English Law, supra note 45 at 10ff. 48 Ibid. at 11. 49 Blackstone, Commentaries, vol 1, supra note 4 at 35. 50 Dicey, English Law, supra note 45 at 25f. 51 Blackstone has been criticized for instrumentally using natural law language to demonstrate the inherent rightness of the common law: see HLA Hart, “Blackstone’s Use of the Law of Nature” (1956) 3 Butterworths South African Law Review 169; Samuel I Shuman, Legal Positivism: Its Scope and Limitations (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1963) at 185–86. 52 See Helge Dedek, “Of Rights Superstructural, Inchoate and Triangular: The Role of Rights in Blackstone’s Commentaries” in Donal Nolan & Andrew Robertson, eds, Rights and Private Law (Oxford: Hart, 2011) 183 at 185, n 12. 53 Dicey, English Law, supra note 45 at 22; for another reference by Dicey to ‘symmetry’, see ibid. at 18. 54 On the aesthetics of scholastic jurisprudence and the significance of concordance and symmetry see Helge Dedek, “The Splendour of Form: Scholastic Jurisprudence and ‘Irrational Formality’” (2011) 5:2 Law and Humanities 349 [Dedek, “Splendour”].

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The theoretical drift underlying Dicey’s image of legal scholarship is hardly surprising, given the general state of English legal thought throughout the nineteenth century. With the notable exception of Henry Sumner Maine’s English version of a historical jurisprudence, the dominant current had mainly developed within the theoretical parameters set out by John Austin’s analytical jurisprudence,55 which thus was seen as the most sophisticated form of legal scholarship at the time. In devising his ‘philosophy of positive law’, Austin had followed in the footsteps of Bentham, who had prepared the ground for legal positivism56 and had caustically criticized Blackstone’s work and also ridiculed the discourse of natural rights in general.57 In his historical work on English jurisprudence, Neil Duxbury diagnoses a lack of innovation in English legal thought in the nineteenth century; he explicitly draws a connection between the continuing adherence to the Austinian paradigm and both the comparatively slow development of law as an academic discipline in England and the ailing state of English legal education.58 Dicey himself compared the state of affairs in England with that of Germany, France, Scotland and the US, where academic legal education was more safely established,59 and he singled out the contributions of Pothier, Savigny, Vangerow, Mancini and Bluntschli as ‘great works of foreign jurists’ whose impact far exceeded that of even the most influential English legal scholarship.60 IV. A View to the Continent: German Legal Science – and Another Inaugural Lecture It is true that on the European continent, given its long-standing history and traditionally less judge-centred legal culture, legal academia in the nineteenth century was far better established, more professionalized and also more highly regarded than in England. This environment enabled a more multifaceted scholarly discourse and more flourishing text production. However, this did not change the fact that law as an academic discipline faced the same challenge of defining its new role within the changing university institution, having to prove its status as science on the one hand, while on the other hand having to justify and defend this very ‘scientificity’ against the increasing pressures of state control and the demands of the profession. And it is fascinating to note that between these two poles of ‘science’ (i.e., theoretical scholarship) and ‘practice’, and between the dialectic dynamics of state ‘disciplining’ and identity-seeking ‘self-disciplining’, there emerged a paradigm of ‘normal’ legal science characterized by a restriction to positive law, formalism and system-building, and at the same time a claim to pedagogical superiority – thus bearing a striking resemblance to the reigning paradigm in the English academic legal discourse. These dynamics are particularly visible in German legal academia, which was frequently named in the nineteenth century, especially in the US, as the prototype of a professionalized legal professoriate.61 A. Discipline-Formation and Law as Science In the changing environment of German academia around the turn from the eighteenth to the nineteenth century, the fact that law had traditionally been taught at the university was not enough on its own to justify 55 Dicey, “Jurisprudence”, supra note 18 at 386. Regarding Austin, Dicey writes that ‘of that author’s merits it is impossible to speak too highly’, although he also criticizes him, mainly for his aesthetic shortcomings – his ‘laborious and crabbed’ style (‘it is hardly an exaggeration to say that he cannot handle the English language’, ibid.) and, remarkably, for a ‘certain want of sense of proportion’ (ibid. at 388; see also Dedek, “Splendour”, supra note 54). 56 Jeremy Bentham, Of Laws in General, ed by HLA Hart (London, UK: Athlone Press, 1970) (appeared originally in 1782). 57 See Jeremy Bentham, “Anarchical Fallacies; Being an Examination of the Declarations of Rights Issued during the French Revolution” in The Works of Jeremy Bentham, Published under the Superintendence of his Executor, John Bowring, ed by Richard Donne (Edinburgh: William Tait, 1843) vol 2 (famously describing natural rights discourse as ‘nonsense upon stilts’ at 501). 58 Neil Duxbury, “English Jurisprudence between Austin and Hart” (2005) 91:1 Va L Rev 1 at 4, 77 et passim. 59 Dicey, English Law, supra note 45 at 19. 60 Ibid. at 27. 61 Mathias Reimann, “A Career in Itself – The German Professoriate as a Model for American Legal Academics” in Mathias Reimann, ed, The Reception of Continental Ideas in the Common Law World 1820–1920 (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1993) 165.

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recognition as an academic discipline: law as a ‘discipline’ had to prove (both to itself and to the other disciplines!) that it was a ‘science’ and not, indeed, a craft. As the medieval academic structures that had elevated law as a ‘higher faculty’ over the mere artes were abandoned,62 the legitimacy of law as an academic discipline was called into question. The traditional medieval hierarchy of faculties had been determined by what was understood to be the ‘practical’ usefulness of knowledge and skills imparted in a faculty; now, the substantive, seemingly objective standard of Wissenschaftlichkeit – ‘scientificity’ – became the benchmark.63 In positing this new standard, the medieval hierarchies were challenged and the academic territory re-mapped, such that the process of disciplineformation became an academic turf battle. A famous example of this is Kant’s The Contest of the Faculties, in which he made clear that all the learned jurist could do and was supposed to do was to restrict his research to the ‘laws of Mine and Thine’ – that is, to positive law, not the laws of reason.64 An example of the budding genre of ‘theory of science’ (‘Wissenschaftskunde’ or ‘Enzyklopädie’)65 is the Attempt at a Systematic Encyclopedia of Sciences, written (in German) in 1797 by Wilhelm Traugott Krug, professor of philosophy and, as of 1805, successor to Kant’s chair in Königsberg. In this ‘encyclopedia’, which tries to categorize human knowledge and to align these categories with the established faculties and emerging academic disciplines, Krug’s scepticism towards the status of law as a proper science is obvious: it becomes clear that it is only because of the time-honoured institutional tradition of academic legal teaching that law is included in the encyclopedia in the first place – that is, because of its ‘dignity’ and ‘usefulness’. However, in the strict sense, Krug wrote, jurisprudence cannot ever amount to a science if it simply focuses on positive law; since positive law is ephemeral and arbitrary in nature, its ordering and systematization can never be driven by a rational theory of perpetual validity.66 He conceded that the study of law can be interesting, fruitful and agreeable if it is conducted tastefully (sic!) and with regard to history and philosophy; but if pursued as a breadwinning craft, it becomes a sheer matter of memorization and routine which, through its dryness and barrenness, dulls and restrains the mind.67 By contrast, the properly scientific discipline of natural law, the examination of elementary questions of right and wrong, is, in Krug’s taxonomy, not categorized as a matter of legal scholarship, but as a matter of practical philosophy. While law was trying to define its boundaries as a discipline, criticism such as Krug’s must have touched upon deep-seated insecurities. In the midst of this troubling confusion as to law’s disciplinary identity, it was the idea of a ‘Historical Jurisprudence’ that presented a surprising solution. Legal scholarship, Savigny suggested, should indeed be defined as a science of positive law, strictly separated from the philosophical speculation on natural law. However, at the same time, ‘positive law’ – the object of this legal science – should be recast as drawing its legitimacy not from the enactment of a sovereign but from its own historicity. Thus, the object of legal scholarship was reinvented as the dignified outcome of a law-like process of evolutionary civilization,68 rather than as the product of arbitrary or contingent legislative fashions. Savigny thereby offered a justification for recognizing positive law as the proper object of a proper science – and hence furnished no less than an intellectual foundation for legal scholarship as an academic discipline.69

62 For an introduction to the traditional structure – the foundational artes and the three ‘higher faculties’ of theology, law and medicine – see e.g. Reinard Brandt, Wozu noch Universitäten? (Hamburg: Meiner, 2011) at 29–49. 63 Schröder, supra note 15 at 142ff. 64 Immanuel Kant, Der Streit der Facultäten in drey Abschnitten (Königsberg: Friedrich Nicolovius, 1798) at 18ff. Kant hesitates to accord the quality of a ‘science’ to any of the three ‘higher faculties’; see Reinhard Brandt, Universität zwischen Selbst- und Fremdbestimmung: Kants ‘Streit der Fakultäten’ (Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie, Sonderband 5) (Berlin: Akademie, 2003) 36f, 94. On Kant’s ‘Streit’, see also – in the present volume – Vincent Forray, “Qu’est-ce qu’une ‘faculté’ de droit? De la philosophie au droit. (Petits jeux autour de la question)”, ch 14. 65 Schröder, supra note 15 at 147, n 72. 66 Wilhelm Traugott Krug, Versuch einer systematischen Enzyklopädie der Wissenschaften, Zweyter Teil (Wittenberg, Leipzig: Winkelmann, 1797) at 128f. 67 Ibid. at 129 [translated by author]. 68 Helge Dedek, “When the Law Became ‘Cultivated’: European Legal Culture between ‘Kultur’ and Civilization” in Geneviève Helleringer & Kai Purnhagen, eds, Towards a European Legal Culture (Munich: CH Beck, 2014) 351. 69 Schröder, supra note 15 at 163ff.

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It must be kept in mind that ‘Historical Jurisprudence’ was never meant to be a disinterested, merely observational history of law;70 rather, it was a doctrinal elucidation and reconstruction of an ideal positive law, and indeed, it famously postulated a specifically German law even before a German nation-state was born. It is an underappreciated aspect of Savigny’s genius that his theory of law achieved the seemingly impossible, establishing legal scholarship as a confident, properly ‘scientific’ academic discipline, while at the same time maintaining a link with practice71 through the claim that this science could rationalize, explain and even improve the actual law in force through doctrinal systematization – a virtue which also justified situating legal education in the university. This new creed came at a price: while law thus established itself as a discipline, its ties with the equally consolidating philosophical discourse were almost entirely cut. The first decades of the nineteenth century witnessed the development of a highly theorized yet often explicitly aphilosophical legal scholarship that eventually grew into the formalistic style of ‘pandectism’.72 In an academic system of distinct and separated disciplines, ‘legal philosophy’ eventually had to reinvent itself as a sub-discipline of the academic discipline of law: a philosophy by lawyers for lawyers that has inspired snide comments from professional philosophers and self-conscious jurists alike.73 B. Legal Education: Serving the State Thus self-disciplined, German legal academia was able to establish itself as an integral part of the modernized university and – in an apparent success story – as a role model for the less professionalized and less recognized legal professoriate abroad.74 Yet while law, in competing with other disciplines, had to prove that it was not just a craft but a proper science, the case also had to be made that such a science was the appropriate and indeed indispensable foundation for practical legal craftsmanship – which in the process was dignified by the extension of the label of ‘science’ to the practice of law.75 In its primary focus on positive law – i.e. national positive law – legal academia could still lay claim to relevance for the practice of law. But the theoretical drift brought about by its ‘scientific’ ambitions and by the casual disdain for the statutory law in force that stemmed from its historicism inevitably created tensions with the second prong of the project – that is, to legitimize law as a university discipline for the training of lawyers, and to justify the claim that university studies are particularly well suited to and indeed indispensable for preparing aspiring lawyers and jurists for practice. As we have seen, requirements were imposed to discipline university legal education from the outside; the mechanism with the most lasting impact was the Prussian system of centralized examinations, which regulated entry into law-related occupations and served as the model for the German State Examination.76

70 See e.g. Hermann Kantorowicz, “Savigny and the Historical School of Law” (1937) 53 Law Q Rev 326 at 337ff. 71 Schröder, supra note 15 at 165. 72 Franz Wieacker, Privatrechtsgeschichte der Neuzeit unter besonderer Berücksichtigung der deutschen Entwicklung (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1967) at 430ff. The depiction of the nineteenth-century legal science as a philosophical (a commonplace particularly in the later nineteenth century) is, of course, as much a simplification as the contemporaneous dichotomy that divided scholars into the ‘Philosophical’ and the (victorious) ‘Historical’ Schools. 73 Wolfgang Kersting, “Neukantianische Rechtsbegründung” in Dietmar Willoweit, ed, Die Begründung des Rechts als historisches Problem (Munich: R Oldenbourg, 2000) 269 at 270, n 7. See also Helge Dedek, “‘Ideenphobie’, Idealismus, Erkenntnistheorie: Einige Anmerkungen zur Entwicklung der Theorie vom Subjektiven Recht im ausgehenden 19. Jahrhundert” in Claes Peterson, ed, Idealistische Philosophie und die Juristen im 19. Jahrhundert (Stockholm: Rönnels Antikvariat, forthcoming 2015). 74 C.f. Reimann, supra note 61. 75 See Joachim Rückert, “‘Theorie und Praxis’ am Beispiel der Historischen Rechtsschule, mit einem Ausblick bis heute” in Claes Peterson, ed, Rechtswissenschaft als juristische Doktrin, Ein rechtshistorisches Seminar in Stockholm 29. bis 30. Mai 2009 (Stockholm: Rönnels Antikvariat, 2011) at 235, 239ff. 76 For a comprehensive overview of this development in Prussia in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, see the very detailed study by Levin Goldschmidt, Rechtsstudium und Prüfungsordnung, Ein Beitrag zur Preußischen und Deutschen Rechtsgeschichte (Stuttgart: F Enke, 1887) at 177ff. For the development after 1849 specifically, see also Ina Ebert, Die Normierung der juristischen Staatsexamina und des juristischen Vorbereitungsdienstes in Preußen (1849–1934) (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1995).

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In the context of this growing tension between academia and state regulation, in 1886, Franz von Liszt, a criminal law scholar from Austria, delivered a speech addressing the reform of academic legal education in Prussia77 – on the occasion of his appointment as President of the University of Marburg. This third inaugural speech is our final example of a justification and defence of university-based legal education. Von Liszt’s choice of topic was motivated, the reader learns, by a heated debate that had by that point been ongoing for almost half a century on the tension between academic freedom and state-imposed disciplining in the structuring of the university legal curriculum. This lecture is remarkable in two ways. The first is in its surprising similarities to Dicey’s plea for a university-based legal education. Of course, the institutional framework being different, the principle of university responsibility for legal education as such was not called into question on the continent; and yet, the necessity to justify its utility never seemed to cease, not even where it was so deeply entrenched by long-standing tradition. Second, it points us to another aspect of the (self-) disciplining of law: the way in which the self-image of the academic changed both in the context of the modernized university of the nineteenth century and in an attempt to reconcile the role of the scholar with the role of the law teacher as civil servant. The Republic of Letters, the domicile of the academic until the end of the eighteenth century, had been replaced by the nation-state. Von Liszt outlined the problem: the university as institution had initially been born out of the corporate spirit of a free community of teachers and learners brought together by a shared purpose. However, with the rise of the nation-state, the character of universities had changed: instead of private ‘scholarly academies’, universities had now turned into state institutions of higher learning (‘Hochschulen’) whose mission was to educate civil servants, teachers and doctors – traditional academic freedom squared with the mission of public education in the service of the state.78 In this interpretation of the teaching mission, the disciplining of academic legal teaching was not achieved as an indirect effect of professional exams that police the access of university graduates to the profession. Rather, this disciplining was effected by the dual role of the law professor as a scholar and researcher entitled to academic freedom, and at the same time as a civil servant and thus an instrument to train jurists for the state bureaucracy, the bench and the bar. A definition of the role of the law professor that pushed the civil service aspect even further could be found in France, where the academic legal curriculum was strictly regulated by the state and left little freedom for any ‘scientific’ ambitions.79 But how to reconcile these seemingly irreconcilable roles of the free-spirited scholar and the duty-bound civil servant? Defending law as an academic discipline, and thus also defending the inextricable connectedness of research and instruction, von Liszt – just like Dicey three years earlier – aimed to convince the reader that legal science served an immediate purpose in legal education, that ‘scientific’ training was indeed indispensable for any practising lawyer or administrator. The crisis of legal education, he held, was illustrated by the many students who, without any true love for knowledge, pursued legal studies solely for the sake of gaining access to the profession, having hopelessly fallen prey to the ‘spirit of the craftsman’ (‘dem Handwerkergeiste hoffnungslos anheimgefallen’) and thereby desecrating the ‘temple of science’.80 However, he continued, legal science in fact benefited the public educational institution in that it was legal science alone that endowed the future practitioner with the skills necessary to handle the growing mass of legislative materials – specifically, by way of reduction to general principles and the integration of the principles into a closed, scientific system.81 V. Conclusion Von Liszt’s argument then becomes clear: despite the aesthetic argument that the law should be pursued not in the spirit of the craftsman but with some scholarly dignity, ‘scientific’ pursuits are justified by their benefits 77 Franz von Liszt, Die Reform des Juristischen Studiums in Preußen (Berlin: J Guttentag, 1886). 78 Ibid. at 10. 79 Jean-Louis Halpérin, Histoire du droit privé français depuis 1804 (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 2012) at 41ff. 80 Von Liszt, supra note 77 at 18. 81 Ibid.

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for the actual practice of law. While many factors differed between England and continental Europe, we see that even in the latter, where university-based legal education had been a tradition for centuries, the ‘scientific’ paradigm had not only to prove itself in the academic environment but also to assert itself as an integral part of state-administered legal education; in the process, it became partly absorbed into the state apparatus as an instrument for supplying the Weberian bureaucracies of the nation-state with legal personnel. Law professors will recognize (to varying degrees, depending on their home jurisdiction and home institution) these instrumentalist pressures and the complex tension between asserting freedom from external control on the one hand and the necessity to ‘sell’ an academic, intellectualized legal education to lawyers and administrators on the other. With the demise of ‘legal science’, the sales pitch has become more difficult. As the nation-state as the dominant intellectual point of reference begins its decline, the gap between scholarship and education grows wider, and so the identity of the legal ‘discipline’ is more challenged than ever. It is indicative of this widening gap that even elite institutions now increasingly focus on imparting ‘skills’, thus willingly integrating more elements of craftsmanship into academic legal education, while refraining from facing the question of the intellectual proprium of a specifically university-based education in law. Theorists such as Roberto Unger have long claimed that legal analysis and legal education both have to break out of their traditional mould; and that the intellectual history of law provides an arsenal for an institutional re-imagining that makes law unique among academic disciplines.82 For most of us who have been shaped by the existing institutional arrangement, this must seem utopian. Yet the challenge levelled by ‘stateless law’ increases the pressure on the ‘discipline’ to leave the trodden paths and become aware of the historically contingent factors that have come to define what we do. In demarcating the territory, we have erected boundaries that obstruct our view. The chapters that follow represent different responses to this challenge, authored by scholars from North America, the UK and continental Europe. These responses are thus also indicative of how the challenge is perceived and discussed, not only in the sub-disciplines of legal academia, but also in different legal cultures. Perhaps we are already witnessing the beginnings of a new way of thinking about law and legal education.83 Are they portents of the ‘next revolution’ in legal education, to borrow Unger’s term?84 Maybe not; and yet, law (re-)invented itself as a ‘discipline’ once before. It might do so again.

82 Roberto M Unger, What Should Legal Analysis Become? (London: Verso, 1996); see also, most recently, Roberto M Unger, “The Next Revolution in Legal Education”, online: (accessed 29 November 2013) [Unger, “Next Revolution”]. 83 See e.g. in the present volume, Peer Zumbansen, “What Lies Before, Behind and Beneath a Case? Five Minutes on Transnational Lawyering and the Consequences for Legal Education”, ch 17. 84 Unger, “Next Revolution”, supra note 82.

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Chapter 3

Teaching Law: ‘Historian and Prophet All in One’

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Shauna Van Praagh*

I. Introduction: Stories of the Law Faculty In The Truth About Stories: A Native Narrative, Cherokee-Greek-Canadian Professor of English, Thomas King, asserts that ‘[t]he truth about stories is that that’s all we are’.1 Stories are repeated many times, he tells us, and each time they change – sometimes through the voice of the storyteller, sometimes through the response of the listeners, sometimes through the order of the pieces that make up the story. ‘But in all the tellings of all the tellers’,2 King says, there is a crucial element of the story that stays, something that makes that particular story the stuff of what we are. King’s message resonates with teachers of law. After all, the stories we tell change with each telling – whether in their details or in the voice and tone with which we deliver them. From year to year, students may listen in different ways and respond with questions that modify the path along which the story unfolds. But the stories we repeat – in the classroom, in the corridor, in conferences, in collections – typically retain their core message. They are what we teach and what our students, as jurists, learn and do. They are what we are. The unchanging core of the story that runs through King’s lecture-essays is the fact that the earth floats in space on the back of a turtle. Someone inevitably asks, ‘What’s below the turtle?’ Another turtle, replies the storyteller, and another turtle, and another turtle … turtles all the way down.3 What are the foundational or unchanging stories that we as law teachers tell, stories that make up who and what we are? We too think about the support structures for our world. They may not be turtles, but they may indeed go all the way down – holding each other in place, depending on shared sustenance, joining in collective projects. The truth about stories anchors my reflections on the law faculty in the university of the future through the prism and promise of ‘stateless law’. I start with what I mean by law faculty and by stateless law; in doing so, I introduce the approaches to thinking about stateless law found throughout this collection. I then juxtapose the two with a concrete illustration of stateless law teaching: that of the legacy of residential schools for indigenous children in Canada. Approaching the legacy of Canada’s residential schools with what I call a stateless law sensibility dislodges the state from its central place in recollection of the past, engagement with the present and imagination of what lies ahead. The stories of the residential schools provide a context for examining the place of law in our history: law in the form of principles and policies, ideas and institutions – some attached to the state, others beyond state reach. The responses to the residential schools provide a context for examining the place of law in our future: law in the form of responses and responsibilities, projects and practices – some situated within state mechanisms, others created as meaningful alternatives. I then suggest that teaching about and through residential schools with this stateless law sensibility helps law students develop three interrelated capacities crucial to the roles they will take on as jurists. They learn how to translate, they learn how to exercise judgment and they learn how to take on the responsibility of stewardship. As teachers of law, we help develop the capacities of our students to engage in translation, judgment and stewardship conscious of what it means to be entrusted with these tasks. * These reflections are dedicated to the memory of my colleague, Roderick Macdonald, whose encouragement and suggestions helped shape this text, and whose life stories and insights continue to inspire my teaching and learning as a law professor. 1 Thomas King, The Truth About Stories: A Native Narrative (Toronto: Anansi, 2003) at 2. 2 Ibid. at 1. 3 Ibid. 1

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Finally, I will conclude that articulating what we do in this way underscores the importance of our intergenerational storytelling. Our stories move back and forth from understandings of the past to dreams of the future, from listening to the lessons of others to trying out new voices and directions. Awareness and appreciation of our history combined with creativity and courage vis-à-vis what lies ahead characterize the potential of teaching with stateless law sensibility for the law faculty of the future.

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II. The Faculty of (Stateless) Law: Place, Programme, People Two working definitions – of law faculty, and of stateless law – precede the concrete exploration of the consequences of their juxtaposition. For both, I will indicate my understanding of the terms I am using by distinguishing them from possible alternatives. As readers of this book collection will discover, the contributions focus on the place of the law faculty in tomorrow’s university, the relationship of law to other disciplines, and mixity or hybridity in the practice and production of law. In doing so, they offer insight, innovation, critical analysis and illustration of the challenges and promises of stateless law thinking, pedagogy and approaches to governance. The divisions, captured by the Table of Contents, separate the ‘discipline’ of stateless law from its forms and aspirations, on one hand, and its practice and pedagogy on the other. While these boundaries are artificial, they do serve to organize the kinds of questions that can and must be asked of law – as we study, teach, use and develop it across diverse sites and structures. In my own reflections on stateless law, I begin by thinking about the ‘law faculty’. When we speak of the ‘law faculty’, we might refer to place – the location of the faculty of law on the university map, connected by well-worn paths to the homes of other faculties and departments. Alternatively, ‘law faculty’ directs us to the shape and content of the education it offers, specifically of the degree programmes in law in which students can enrol. ‘Law faculty’ then may refer to place or to programme. But it also refers to people – the members of the law faculty who sustain legal education and its relationship to the aims and preoccupations of the university. The law faculty is the people engaged in teaching and learning law, and in developing knowledge and abilities within and beyond a recognized discipline housed in the university. The contributions to this collection illustrate the multiple meanings of law faculty as place, people and practice. So, too, the authors in this collection grapple with overlapping and alternative definitions or understandings of ‘stateless law’ itself. The notion of ‘stateless law’ might signify cosmopolitan hybridity, tied up with resistance to constraining identity and institutional structures rooted in particular systems, states, traditions or communities. That is, stateless law might invite us to acknowledge a spectrum of backgrounds or contexts – each shaped and modified by specific sources and interpretive methods – which in turn nurtures a spectrum of modes of expression or engagement.4 Alternatively, ‘stateless’ could erase the need to name the background or to colour in its contours. A stateless law sensibility can shift our focus from law against a background of state or system, or law as the embodiment of state policy or state institutional processes. A stateless law sensibility can approach law as a particular way of framing real or hypothetical problems, of integrating or generating human experience and interaction and of developing clear, considered and creative responses. A perspective according to which the state is central to the learning, teaching and doing of law assumes that rules, language, legal actors, policy, systems and professional preparation are all intertwined with the state, and thus would be marginalized or even discarded by a faculty imbued with a stateless law sensibility. Instead, however, these staples of law and legal education can be understood to be crucial pieces of stateless law teaching and learning. The difference is in the vantage point from which their significance is examined. Rather than emphasizing ‘what’ the rules are, the principal question becomes ‘how’ they are articulated, sustained and connected to context. Instead of reaching for a comparative chart of methodological narratives and substantive norms embedded in legal traditions, there is an acceptance that no such chart truly exists and 4 James Boyd White says that ‘all language use or other expressive activity is performance against a background, and when the background changes the meaning of the performance changes too’: James Boyd White, From Expectation to Experience: Essays on Law and Legal Education (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999) at 101.

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that any attempt to create it is superficial and sterile. Rather than learning the role of legal actors within specific systems or institutions, the focus is on their preoccupations, relationships and preferred mechanisms for governance. And, finally, rather than emphasizing the decisions of final appellate courts and their interaction with legislation, the willingness to explore law in multiple places and forms leads to preparation for a wider set of roles and fruitful interactions. The idea that law teaching in the university stretches beyond the ‘what’ to the ‘how’ and ‘why’ is of course not new. Neither is the insistence that the content and method of effective legal education not be constrained by any particular state or indeed any particular system. Recent calls to re-imagine and re-direct university education point to the perils of narrow discipline-bound learning on one hand, and of commodification and standardization on the other. Anthony Kronman looks nostalgically to the past when American universities cared about the meaning of life and the enrichment of students’ souls.5 Boaventura de Sousa Santos looks utopically to a future when European universities join across borders to invest in full human beings, social awareness and a Europe of ideas.6 Combined, they provide significant critique of instrumentalist education, and – as suggested by Roderick Macdonald – point to the need for a renewed commitment to university cultures, in Canada and beyond, in which virtue ethics can flourish.7 These appeals to the nurturing of the soul, ethical engagement and citizenship for social justice resonate with the defining identity dilemma that law faculties know all too well – that is, the tension between law faculty as ‘community of higher learning’ and law school as ‘service-institution for a profession’.8 Any or all of them provide paths for dislodging fixed state institutions from their prominence in legal education, and challenging state-defined parameters for legal profession and practice. As reflected throughout this collection, stateless law as discipline and pedagogy is above all else aspirational. My approach in what follows is less obviously ambitious. It is grounded in a concrete illustration of what teaching and learning from a stateless law sensibility looks like and how it feels. But it does share with these broader appeals, and with the framework of this book, a preoccupation with the connections between past and future, between knowing and doing, between learning and taking on responsibility, between listening and finding new ways to speak. III. Residential Schools in Canada: An Illustration of Law Teaching and Learning I turn now to my promised example: that of the legacy of residential schools for Canada’s First Nations children. Conceived and implemented as a result of federal government policy, and sustained by the cooperation of many religious organizations, residential schools removed Aboriginal children from their families and home communities and placed them in what are referred to as ‘total institutional settings’.9 Children in residential schools experienced the disconnection and powerlessness associated with institutional life – what was felt as psychological, emotional and spiritual suffering – and, in many circumstances, were also subjected to physical and sexual abuse. Woven into the harm for First Nations children was the blow to identity through the deprivation of native languages, cultural frameworks and faith traditions.

5 Anthony T Kronman, Education’s End: Why Our Colleges and Universities Have Given Up on the Meaning of Life (New Haven, Conn: Yale University Press, 2007). 6 Boaventura de Sousa Santos, “The University at a Crossroads” (2012) 10:1 Human Architecture 7. 7 Roderick Macdonald, “Does Law Have a Place in the Modern University” (Podcast delivered at the London School of Economics, 7 February 2012), online: LSE . 8 The tension could include law schools as critics of law in society, thus producing what Paul Maharg labels a triple bind and the trigger for a pragmatist programme of study moving to and fro between legal analysis and social situation. Paul Maharg, Transforming Legal Education: Learning and Teaching the Law in the Early Twenty-First Century (Aldershot, Hampshire, UK: Ashgate, 2007) at 271–2. 9 The phrase is used and its meaning is described by Erving Goffman in Asylums: Essays on the Social Situation of Mental Patients and Other Inmates (Chicago: Aldine, 1961) at 6.

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Grounded in the history and geography of Canada, the residential school system in place for roughly 100 years across the country affected not only the thousands of individual Aboriginal children enrolled in them, but also their families and communities. The collective and complex nature of the impact of residential schools is mirrored by the collective and complex nature of their origins and maintenance. Entire societies can implement harmful policies and practices. Entire societies can be affected. And entire societies can search for ways to listen with care and to cooperate in response and reconstruction. For students of law, the residential school legacy not only illustrates the phenomenon of harm reaching beyond the individual, but also the fact that entire societies can implement policies and practices the impact of which requires careful listening and cooperative problem-solving on the part of all participants. As the Law Commission of Canada showed in its influential Report and Recommendations to the Minister of Justice,10 responses to the needs of those harmed by the policies and practices associated with Canada’s residential schools can be found across a spectrum of societal and legal possibilities. Two of those responses – in the form of a compensation scheme (informed by a civil liability framework) and of a truth and reconciliation process – have been particularly prominent. Still, however, the consequences of residential schools both for individual survivors and their communities continue to elude effective and satisfying resolution. In his novel, Porcupines and China Dolls, Robert Arthur Alexie captures the challenge: But all that is someday and far away. Today he has returned home and he is a stranger in his own land. He doesn’t have any parents or grandparents and he doesn’t understand his language. For nine years he wished he was out of that hellhole. He finally got his wish. But today, for some strange reason, he wishes he were back. He is confused by these feelings, but he doesn’t dwell on it. He has to relearn his language and the ways of his People. His survival depends on it – literally.11

What does it mean to approach the teaching of the legacy of residential schools to law students with a stateless law sensibility? This is a story clearly rooted in the constitution and history of one particular state. But what initially looks like a straightforward history lesson – combined with consideration of mechanisms available in different areas of law – becomes an opportunity to incorporate voices and experiences usually not heard in legal education and to imagine roles that revitalize legal practice. The state cannot of course disappear from the stories told about residential schools for Canada’s indigenous children. But it can be approached as only one, albeit important, part of the picture – always in interaction with others. Rather than anchoring the history of residential schools, state systems and institutions and policies become part of a multi-pronged inquiry focused on their design, implementation and administration. Rather than dictating the constraints of the mechanisms available for responding to the harm caused by residential schools, those same state systems and institutions and policies interact with community initiatives, truth and reconciliation processes, and memory-preserving projects. In other words, while the state obviously figures in a significant way both in knowledge of the past and the taking on of responsibilities for the future, neither learning nor practice is constrained by the state. Teaching from this approach has implications for the range of sources with which students can engage, and for the range of responses that invite their legal imagination and creativity. What are some of the pieces of the teaching and learning picture in the context of residential schools? To begin, stories found in the varied forms of survivors’ accounts impress upon their listeners the effects of separation, isolation, disconnection and fear. The severe actions taken to punish transgressions, the mechanisms created to enforce authority, the failure to respect education and health standards, the patterns of physical and sexual abuse, and the loss of family ties and cultural confidence: all are at least partially captured by stories.12 10 Law Commission of Canada, Restoring Dignity: Responding to Child Abuse in Canadian Institutions (Ottawa: Public Works and Government Services Canada, 2000). 11 Robert Arthur Alexie, Porcupines and China Dolls (Toronto: Stoddart, 2002) at 16. 12 See e.g. ibid.; Basil H Johnston, “Foreword” in Sam McKegney, ed, Magic Weapons: Aboriginal Writers Remaking Community after Residential Schools (Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 2007) vii; Kevin Loring, Where the Blood Mixes (Vancouver: Talon, 2009); Agnes Grant, No End of Grief: Indian Residential Schools in Canada (Winnipeg: Pemmican, 1996).

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Even if less filled out than a narrative or account, a short poem can provoke comprehension of the impact of residential schools on individual lives and of the importance of voice: I lost my talk The talk you took away. When I was a little girl At Shubenacadie school. You snatched it away: … So gently I offer my hand and ask, Let me find my talk So I can teach you about me.13

But side by side with the stories come scrutiny of formal inquiries and reports, compensation guidelines, government and church apologies, community rebuilding initiatives, statements of claim and appellate court facta. Students struggle to creatively redefine injury, examine the scope and sources of vicarious and direct liability, and reflect comparatively on the objectives and participant expectations of a truth and reconciliation structure. The picture includes critical reading of judgments, analysis of the drafting of policies and regulations, and appreciation of the importance and difficulties of cooperation among First Nations representatives, individuals, and communities and their non-indigenous counterparts. And it opens the door to the exploration of human interaction through unspoken forms, impossible to express through words and writing; ceremonies, rituals, symbols, practices of mourning and celebration are all potential means of participation and reconstruction. In all of these aspects of teaching and learning about residential schools, the form and content of past and current norms and rules are exposed to examination, critique and recasting for the future. Taken together, they provide teachers of law and their students with the sense of being submerged in inquiry and burdened with responsibility. It is no coincidence that it is difficult to imagine precisely which law classroom could house within it such a broad and multifaceted project. Our classrooms are typically tied to courses within our law programme curriculum, and there is rarely space in those course outlines for the integrated engagement and sustained study of intersecting modes of human interaction provoked by the residential schools example. Knowledge of past and place, and the generated potential for imaginative and sensitive projects envisaged for future generations, aren’t located with ease in categories of Canadian law – whether private or public, tort or criminal, administrative or constitutional. Neither do they correspond to clearly identifiable categories in the work of a jurist such as litigation, policy advising or drafting. Rather than casting these observations as evidence of confusion or lack of clarity – precisely the concern often voiced with respect to the notion of stateless law – they can instead be taken as indicators of the realistic blurriness of borders and mix of methods. Any or all courses offered by law teachers for law students become relevant sites for the intellectual reflection and preparation for practice embodied in the residential school context: whether considering local responses to child abuse within the family or considering the parameters of truth and reconciliation in post-conflict Sierra Leone. Stateless law, then, shifts our attention from the learning of specific rules and the assumption of specific roles associated with specific states or systems. It invites us to hear and tell renewed narratives, and to take on and exercise renewed responsibilities. The teachers and students who accept the invitation engage in the conservation, generation and transformation of knowledge and actions, across a range of law-creating sources and law-practising participation. Rules and regulations, policies and practices remain important in stateless law – through past interpretation and in the shaping of imagination. The local remains important – as source of real stories and site for the construction of larger narrative. And roles of the jurist remain important – as varied ways of sharing the tasks 13 Rita Joe, “I Lost my Talk” in Patricia A Monture & Patricia D McGuire, eds, First Voices: An Aboriginal Women’s Reader (Toronto: Inanna, 2009) 129 at 129.

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of listening, relating, initiating, consolidating, activating and creating. Stateless is not the same as floating, fictional or disconnected. Indeed the permeability of boundaries intrinsic to stateless law teaching and learning makes possible the concrete intersection of academic endeavour and preparation for practice. I have explored the legacy of residential schools as an example of the ways in which teaching shaped by stateless law sensibility combines knowing and doing, understanding and practice. It is an illustration of how stateless legal education is particularly well grounded and well-suited for the responsibilities of tomorrow’s jurists and the talents of those who teach them. I now turn to translation, judgment and stewardship – three interdependent capacities developed in law students and practised by jurists. I suggest not only that these are capacities that deserve attention and nurture by the law faculty, but that they are reinforced by the kind of stateless law teaching that I have just described. IV. Translation, Judgment and Stewardship: Teaching to Know and Do Translation, according to James Boyd White, describes both the study and practice of law.14 Translation balances respect for an original text with the translator’s own creative judgment to make something at once old – that is, a version of another’s work – and new – that is, a product of the translator’s interpretive efforts. That project, something that Paul Ricoeur understands as an innately human activity, is core to learning law.15 Rules – and their counterpart customs, principles, policies and processes – are not simply transmitted from one generation to the next or from teacher to student. Instead, they are constantly translated as they are retold, resituated and revised. Translation is not limited to understanding what happens to rules as they are passed on, applied or tested. As White teaches his students, ‘in law very little is done simply “right” or “wrong”; … the lawyer must perpetually make choices under conditions of radical uncertainty; [and] the central quality of the mind of the lawyer is therefore her capacity for judgment’.16 Translation is a way of teaching and communicating the skills and habits of creativity, respect, responsibility and, importantly, judgment. Indeed, judgment is perhaps the principal quality that captures the jurist’s responsibilities to communicate, connect and construct. In order to exercise that judgment, the jurist learns a new language, and transforms arguments and objectives through its vocabulary and grammar, thus engaging in constant and creative translation. The capacity for judgment is a significant objective for all students of law. The connection between translation and judgment sharpens the mind and develops intellectual depth and self-conscious humility. But that connection can also be understood as preparation for the range of roles and responsibilities that jurists take on, starting with and extending beyond, their formal university legal education. Here, I turn to the image and activity of ‘stewardship’, inspired by a recent project of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching in which university scholars were asked to articulate the ways in which doctoral education produced ‘stewards of the discipline’.17 Stewardship was understood to encompass requisite skills in addition to ‘mastery of the values and principles necessary for the generation, conservation and transformation of knowledge’18 – in other words, the combination of critical thinking with the ‘habits of heart and mind’ particular to each discipline.19 At first glance, the concept of stewardship of law risks being mistaken with the protection or control of a fixed framework for governing human interaction; indeed it risks falling into the trap of academy versus 14 White, supra note 4 at 80–84. 15 Paul Ricoeur, “Le paradigme de la traduction” in Le Juste 2 (Paris: Editions Esprit, 2001) 125. Ricoeur sees translation both as an important human capacity, inseparable from the human capacity for language (ibid. at 127) and as a fundamental human desire (ibid. at 133). 16 White, supra note 4 at 47. 17 Chris M Golde, “Preparing Stewards of the Discipline” in Chris M Golde & George E Walker, eds, Envisioning the Future of Doctoral Education: Preparing Stewards of the Discipline (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2006) 3 at 5. 18 Ibid. at 10. 19 Yehuda Elkana, “Unmasking Uncertainties and Embracing Contradictions: Graduate Education in the Sciences” in Chris M Golde & George E Walker, eds, Envisioning the Future of Doctoral Education: Preparing Stewards of the Discipline (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2006) 65 at 65–6.

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profession in which law faculties have notoriously been caught. Instead, the activity of stewarding law can be explored for its invitation to openness, flexibility and meaningful participation. Asking what values are conveyed and nurtured by a legal education, such that its participants share habits of heart and mind in the task of stewarding its future, is a crucial question. What values and ‘habits of heart and mind’ can or should be underscored in the learning of law? The reflections of James Boyd White on legal education again point us in the right direction. According to White, ‘[t]he heart of this education is learning to be responsible in a new way for what one thinks and says’.20 That sense of responsibility is both contoured by the individual and grounded within a community: Legal education can be a real education, of the greatest value both personally and professionally, partly because it is a training in the respect due to others; partly because it teaches us that in almost every case reasonable and decent people can take radically opposing views, and therefore that our own opinions are not eternal truths; partly because it insists upon the authority of procedures and institutions, which in this way it constitutes and maintains; and partly because it perpetually tests and surprises the mind by exploring the limits of our discourses and imaginations, as the law is seen to be one language among many.21

Described in this way, legal education does indeed hold the potential for shaping the jurist’s habits of heart and mind. Obligation to listen with respect, ability to participate creatively in shared institutions and awareness of the power of words and ideas: all can be understood as constitutive of a jurist’s roles and responsibilities vis-à-vis the meaning, practice and potential of law. All link together the capacities of translation, judgment and stewardship of law. Finally, all might also be enriched and effectively filled out if disentangled from a state-derived or state-centred framework. Approaching the residential school legacy with a stateless law sensibility provides a powerful illustration of how these three interconnected capacities of translation, judgment and stewardship of law can be honed simultaneously. Law students are reminded of the inevitable particularity of time and space and the ineluctable partial nature of knowledge and participation. They learn to be cautious in placing their faith and trust – or that of others whose interests are at stake – in the state. This of course is a lesson that the survivors of residential schools can teach particularly well. Both humility and fidelity are crucial to an appreciation of the impact of residential schools on Canada’s First Nations people. At the same time, they are integral to meaningful translation, good judgment and responsible stewardship. Meaningful translation rests on a notion of faithfulness to the author’s ideas and text while shifting the idiom in which they are conveyed.22 Good judgment implies fidelity to methodological and substantive norms, and awareness of the faith and trust placed in one’s hands. Responsible stewardship, on the part of an individual concerned with well-being and future development, implies being entrusted with the care, sustenance and direction of a project. In a context – that of residential schools – in which trust and fidelity on the part of state and church authorities were precisely what was at stake, all three capacities can be fruitfully developed. V. Past and Future: Teaching as ‘Historian and Prophet All in One’ I conclude by returning to the stories we tell as law teachers. Legal education that fosters the jurist’s habits of heart and mind is intertwined with the telling of, and listening to, stories – always attuned to the participating voices and to the co-existent languages in which those stories are formulated and revised. The residential school legacy has been explored as an example of learning to translate with sensitivity, exercise responsive judgment and take on the jurist’s weight of stewardship. And I have suggested that, through a stateless law approach, those capacities – of translation, judgment and stewardship of law – are 20 White, supra note 4 at 11. 21 Ibid. at 49. 22 For perspectives on translation and fidelity, see Ricoeur, supra note 15 at 128; François Ost, Le droit comme traduction (Québec: Les Presses de l’Université Laval, 2009).

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developed in ways and sites that go beyond those provided or shaped by formal or state-based systems and institutions. If translation, judgment and stewardship are things that our law students learn, do and learn to do, they should help us articulate what it is that law professors teach, do and teach to do. Clearly, we provide active guidance in reading texts, listening to voices and engaging with sources – all of which model and inculcate the work of translation. We emphasize and encourage critical analysis, questioning of assertions, development of persuasive argumentation: all linked to the refinement of judgment. And we watch and support our students as they join new communities at the same time that they redefine their membership in others – all of which is tied to their shifting understandings of who they are and what responsibilities they hold as participants in and stewards of law. In other words, we teach our students to re-tell well-known stories, to feel the weight that goes with the exercise of judgment and to participate in the constant reshaping of projects. If we teach with the sensibility invited by a stateless law starting point, we do all this at the same time that we show our students how to balance appropriate attention to the state with the incorporation of non-state structures, sources, stories and ways to imagine how things could or should be. With respect to residential schools, that means combining an attitude of humility with an ethos of fidelity, throughout multiple forms of narrative and complex content of individual and collective claims. As law teachers with the obligation to teach our students how to know and do, we share stories of, and faith in, the actors and ideas and practices that have shaped law in the past. And, as our students develop their capacities crucial to their roles as jurists, we try to trigger their imaginations for the future. The capacities for retelling stories, exercising judgment and stewarding law all integrate respect for human experience with expression of human hopes. In other words, they combine history with prophecy. In an address to graduating law students in 1938, Benjamin Cardozo insisted that the lawyer be ‘historian and prophet all in one’.23 Instead of focusing on judges as the principal shapers of the common law, his words were directed at all jurists. Only by looking back can jurists turn to the future; only by imagining what lies ahead can jurists appreciate the past; only by integrating both history and prophecy can jurists grasp what is needed in the here and now. Cardozo’s insistence on combining concrete knowledge with constant creativity, respect for human experience with the expression of human hopes, provides a particularly important lesson for the faculty of law in the university. When teaching members of the faculty tell our stories, when we teach in a way attuned to the possibilities of stateless law, we too act as historians and prophets, all in one.

23 Benjamin Cardozo, “The Game of the Law and Its Prizes” in Benjamin Cardozo, Law and Literature and Other Essays and Addresses (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co, 1931) 160 at 166.

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Part II The ‘Discipline’ of Stateless Law

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Chapter 4

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Ernest J. Weinrib

I. Introduction: The Discipline of Law A discipline is a relational activity carried on within the institutional context of university life. It is relational in that it takes place between teachers and students – the discipuli to whom the term etymologically refers – or among teachers. It is an activity, a set of practices in which teachers and students engage with reference to what is being taught and learned. As an activity, a discipline is distinguished from ‘doctrine’, the body of learning or knowledge for the sake of which teachers and students carry on the discipline. This activity takes place within the university, the institution devoted to caring for and nurturing the intellectual inheritance – the stock of ideas, images, beliefs, skills and modes of thinking – that composes the world’s civilization.1 The role of the university is decisive for the character of the activity. The university does not merely supply the geographical location and the physical facilities where the discipline is carried on. Nor does the university merely assemble the teachers and students who practice the discipline. Rather, the task of the university in caring for and nurturing the intellectual inheritance of civilization provides the conception through which the participants in the discipline orient themselves towards the activity that they perform, towards their interaction with students and colleagues in their discipline, and towards their relationship with other disciplines. As has often been observed, the university is not a place but an idea. Of course, what is involved in caring for the intellectual inheritance of civilization is contestable. But unless the different versions of the university’s mission are seen in those terms, the distinctive role that it plays in social life disappears. Non-professional disciplines take it for granted that their activities make sense only as efforts to preserve and nurture the accumulated legacy of civilized life. A classicist, for instance, who aims to reconstruct the closest approximation to the original Greek text of Aristotle, is motivated by the role of Greek civilization in forming our own, by the importance of Aristotle to our understanding of Greek civilization, by the centrality of Aristotelian ideas in the history of philosophy and by the intrinsic interest in the responsible stewardship and transmission of ancient modes of thinking. The classicist’s methodology of critical textual reconstruction is itself a disciplinary achievement, through the employment of which modern civilization respects and pays homage to an antecedent one. And this achievement is part of the larger one that consists in the attempt to comprehend the past in a scientific spirit. In a professional faculty, such as law, the university’s function is especially crucial to establishing the nature of the discipline. One might think that because the practice of law is a demanding and remunerative activity apart from academic life, one need not be sensitive to the academic dimension of legal study. One might even suppose that the principal mission of law faculties is to produce professional scholarship and training.2 However, the very fact that law is studied in a university context requires such study to be distinguished from purely professional training. Although most students are destined for professional lives and, one hopes, might lead those lives more happily and competently as a consequence of their university studies, one has no reason to suppose that the university is more able to provide professional training than the profession itself. And yet a decisive transfer of legal education from the profession to the university has taken place. In some common

1 Michael Oakeshott, “The Study of ‘Politics’ in a University: An Essay in Appropriateness” in Michael Oakeshott, Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1991) 184 at 187–94. 2 Harry T Edwards, “The Growing Disjunction between Legal Education and the Legal Profession” (1992) 91 Mich L Rev 34.

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law jurisdictions this has happened recently and as a consequence of a considerable struggle.3 The assumption animating this transfer is that the law has a disciplinary nature that places its study at home in an institution devoted to disciplinary activities. How does the academic discipline of law go beyond professional training? In this connection it is worth recalling the brief catalogue of the different modes of knowing law that appears in the introduction of Kant’s Doctrine of Right.4 There Kant sets out a twofold distinction. He first distinguishes between the iurisconsultus (the jurist who knows the law) and the iurisperitus (the jurist who is experienced in the law), and then distinguishes the knowledge that both of these figures have from the subject matter of his book. The iurisconsultus and the iurisperitus are lawyers whose knowledge is confined to positive right, that is, the law that has actually been given. The difference between them is that the iurisconsultus is versed in the doctrine of the law considered as a pure legal science, whereas the iurisperitus not only knows this doctrine but can apply it to cases that come up in experience. The doctrine of right stands in contrast to both these kinds of knowledge; it deals not with the law as actually posited, but with the immutable principles for the very possibility of positing law. It is ‘the systematic knowledge of the doctrine of natural right (ius)’.5 For this knowledge the positive law can serve as a guide but is not its measure. Kant’s comments are part of a repeated criticism in the Doctrine of Right of the limitations of what lawyers know and of the consequent inadequacy in the way lawyers understand the subject matter of their supposed expertise. For example, Kant notes the ‘strange confusion’ of jurists, who treat the right of necessity in criminal law as a denial of culpability rather than as an exemption from punishment, that is, as a justification rather than an excuse.6 Similarly, in dealing with a variety of doctrines of property, contract and evidence, he notes the ‘common fault of experts on right’ in failing to distinguish between considerations that reflect what is right in itself and those that indicate the boundaries of a court’s institutional competence.7 If one reads these criticisms in the light of his initial reference to doctrinaire jurists, the problem seems to be that even the orderly citation of legal doctrine presupposes characterizations and classifications that are normatively charged. Accordingly, the proper understanding of doctrine does not lie in grasping its sheer givenness as positive law, but in also appreciating its implicit normative ideas. From Kant’s observations one can infer that he views the lawyer’s knowledge as deficient in two ways. The first is that the lawyer deals with legal problems as particulars, to be resolved by reference to particular legal norms. Lacking is insight into the systematic nature of law, that is, into the relationship among norms understood as instantiating more general concepts that come together to form an integrated whole. The second is that, to the extent that their accounts of legal norms attempt or imply larger notions of ordering, lawyers have an insufficiently nuanced view of what a normative account involves. Hence lawyers, concerned as they are about the operation of rules rather than their normative grounding, are insensitive to the distinction between culpability and punishability or to the distinct role of institutions. These two deficiencies are related in that the systematicity of legal ordering is the consequence of the law’s being a normative enterprise that requires the coherent justification of its coercively enforced restrictions on freedom. Although for Kant the limitations in lawyers’ knowledge of the law can be overcome only in a metaphysics of morals – hence his reference to the immutable principles for the giving of any positive law – his observations also indicate the minimal focus for law as a discipline. Whatever else law is, it is a normative ordering of social relations. And whatever else the discipline of law might be, it must include an exploration of the nature of the normativity of legal ordering. With respect to private law – on which my remarks will focus – this exploration has at least two aspects. One aspect is relational, in that private law deals with the norms governing the interaction between the parties and with the reasons that support those norms. From the standpoint of law as a discipline, the interest in these 3 C Ian Kyer & Jerome E Bickenbach, The Fiercest Debate: Cecil A Wright, The Benchers, and Legal Education in Ontario 1932–1957 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1987). 4 Immanuel Kant, The Metaphysics of Morals, edited by Mary Gregor (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1996) at 23 [6:229]. 5 Ibid. [emphasis in the original]. 6 Ibid. at 28 [6:236]. 7 Ibid. at 78 [6:297].

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norms is not merely in their existence and application, as it is for Kant’s jurists, but in their intelligibility as norms. Among the issues that arise are: Do coherent reasons justify the norms, and what does coherence mean? Do the reasons that are operative in the liability context constitute a distinctive mode of thinking, and how (if at all) do they differ from reasons found in the contexts of personal or political morality? What are the concepts through which reasoning about liability is carried on, and do these concepts form an integrated set? Do the grounds of liability form a system, whose components can be mapped and classified? And if so, what are the normative presuppositions of this system? The second aspect is institutional. This aspect deals with issues of institutional competence and legitimacy in the formulation of legal doctrine and in the adjudication of legal disputes. It includes attention to the institutional devices for stabilizing doctrine while maintaining flexibility, the differentiation of different mechanisms of law creation and application, and the procedural, evidential and remedial aspects of litigation. This aspect is dependent on the first, because the institutional arrangements should be geared to the reasons that properly figure in a regime of liability. And as with the first aspect, the focus is not on the mere existence of rules governing institutional matters but on the extent to which those rules or others can be justified. Considered as a discipline, law thus involves considerations that range from the specificity of legal doctrine to the generality of the considerations that justify both the doctrine and the institutional arrangements for applying that doctrine. Sophisticated systems of private law both give scope to the full range of these considerations and create a tradition of enquiry into their normative intelligibility. This, indeed, is what makes the phenomenon of law an achievement of civilization both worthy of and demanding the attention of a university discipline. II. Private Law’s Normative Character The discipline of law, accordingly, goes beyond an engagement with the positive law as a body of doctrine known by the iurisconsultus or applied in accordance with the expertise of the iurisperitus. It includes the enquiry into the justificatory notions of coherence and rationality that make, or might make, the law intelligible as a normative phenomenon. These notions are inevitably more general and comprehensive than the particular doctrines to which they apply, because only more general notions can bring particular doctrines and the reasons that support them into a systematic and coherent relationship. Indeed, the more general these notions are, the broader the understanding that they yield. I have argued elsewhere that, so far as private law is concerned, two interrelated ideas represent the broadest conceptions of its normative character.8 One of these ideas concerns the structure of the parties’ relationship in the liability context. The other captures the conception of the person presupposed in the justifications appropriate to this relationship. The structural idea is that, because the liability of the defendant is always a liability to the plaintiff, the normative positions of the parties are correlative to each other. In holding the defendant liable to the plaintiff, a court makes not two separate judgments (one that awards something to the plaintiff and the other that coincidentally takes the same from the defendant), but a single judgment that embraces both parties in their interrelationship. Each party’s position is thus intelligible only in the light of the position of the other. This correlative structure means that a finding of liability is the proper response to injustice only if the reasons for considering something an injustice are those that apply correlatively to both parties. These reasons, and the correlative legal concepts of right and duty that they employ, reflect the identical nature of the injustice that the defendant has done and that the plaintiff has suffered. By exhibiting the parties as the doer and sufferer of the same injustice, the reasoning reflects the unity of the parties’ relationship. Reasoning about liability then functions as a coherent enterprise in justification rather than as the enumeration of a hodgepodge of factors separately relevant only to one or the other of the parties. The other idea is that of personality. In this context, personality refers not to the pattern of an individual’s behavioural characteristics, but to a presupposition about imputability and entitlement that is implicit in the rights and duties of private law. This presupposition is that, as participants in a regime of liability, the parties 8 Ernest J Weinrib, Corrective Justice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012) at 9–37.

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are viewed as free and purposive beings who are not subject to a duty to act for any purpose in particular, no matter how meritorious. Because personality signifies the capacity for purposiveness without regard to particular purposes, no obligation exists to exercise this capacity towards any particular end. Any duties that reflect personality are therefore the negative correlates of rights. These rights arise insofar as the capacity for purposive agency is not merely an inward attribute but achieves external existence in social interactions through its exercise by or embodiment in an agent. Personality provides the normative conception of the person that underlies private law’s correlativity of right and duty. Whereas correlativity captures the normative structure of the parties’ association, personality captures the normative conception of the parties so associated. The two ideas of correlativity and personality are related to the positive law in the following way. Correlativity and personality are implicit in any sophisticated system of private law, because such a system aspires to the internal coherence of the reasons and concepts underlying the grounds of liability that it recognizes. This implicitness follows from the fact that correlativity and personality are nothing but the abstractions that exhibit the structure and the normative presupposition, respectively, of the rights and duties constitutive of coherent relations of private law. Moreover, these abstractions become concrete and specific only if they inform the norms of positive law. Accordingly, correlativity and personality require actualization through authoritative institutions that endow these ideas with a determinate shape, make public the mode of reasoning that accords with them, and undo the consequences of conduct inconsistent with the rights and duties that realize them. Nonetheless, correlativity and personality are not themselves the products of positive law. Rather, they are the theoretical constructs through which one grasps the normative intelligibility of what positive law prescribes. The constructs represent the connection between the parties, as well as the parties so connected, as abstractions stripped of the particularity with which the positive law endows them. The very abstractness of these constructs provides an uncluttered view of what private law requires if private law is to be a normatively coherent phenomenon. Once one includes an exploration of law’s normativity within the discipline of law and then conducts that exploration in terms of correlativity and personality, it is apparent that the discipline of law combines the particularity of legal doctrine within positive law with the abstractness of normative justification. Given that over the last centuries the state has been the prime vehicle for positing law, one may say that the discipline of law both depends on and transcends the state. It is simultaneously state-bound and stateless. A description of the stateless dimension of law – what it achieves and what it lacks – can be found, again, in Kant’s Doctrine of Right. Most of Kant’s book is taken up with an account of the extent to which law is a normative enterprise even in the absence of legal institutions. Kant calls this condition the ‘state of nature’, in contrast to the ‘civil condition’ in which law is laid down and administered by authoritative public institutions. Kant’s state of nature is not a condition from which juridical norms are absent. To the contrary, it is saturated by such norms. The account of the state of nature shows how the various kinds of rights in private law (rights to bodily integrity, to property, to contract performance and to the observance of what we would now regard as fiduciary obligations) arise solely from the normative requirement that the action of one person coexist with the freedom of others. These rights are a reflection of what I earlier termed ‘personality’, the capacity for purposive action regardless of the particular purposes anyone might want to pursue. The point of postulating this state of nature is to exhibit, in abstraction from any particular state, the normative ideas that properly undergird the jural relations between members of any and every state. What the state of nature lacks is public institutions that allow various kinds of rights to be enjoyed by those who hold them.9 Although in the state of nature the rights are intelligible as the markers of legitimate interaction between one person and another, their interpretation and enforcement are matters of each person’s unilateral will. This means that the juridical equality among persons that grounds the various rights cannot, in the absence of public institutions, be carried through to the actual operation of these rights. Whereas the normativity inherent in the various categories of rights is conceptually prior to their entrenchment in positive law, those rights cannot function without such entrenchment. Conversely the necessity for positive law is a consequence of the normativity of rights in the state of nature. In this way, positive law is both required 9 On the defectiveness of the state of nature, see Arthur Ripstein, Force and Freedom: Kant’s Legal and Political Philosophy (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2009) at 145–81.

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by and grounded in the rights that do not originate in positive law. Stateless law and state-bound law are mutually entailed.

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III. Stateless Law Stateless law, the subject of this volume, is a term that can have many meanings. So far I have been using the term to refer to the normative dimension of private law and to the theoretical constructs appropriate to understanding that dimension. This dimension is stateless, in the sense that it is not the creation of a particular state, but is immanent in any system of private law that aspires or tends to the internal coherence of the reasons that justify liability. Stateless law has other possible meanings as well. It might refer to a situation, perhaps exemplified by the operation of custom, in which social rules that are regarded as binding operate without the means of interpretation and enforcement provided by the state. Or it might refer to law that is interpreted and enforced not by the state but by social and political units that are either larger or smaller, either by a suprastate organization or by a sub-state community. Or it might refer to an enquiry that focuses on the law of more than one jurisdiction rather than paying exclusive attention to that of a single state. The McGill transsystemic programme, which inspires this volume, transcends jurisdictional boundaries in this last-mentioned way by offering an integrated exposure to both common and civil law. These various kinds of stateless law raise two different issues. One issue is whether the longstanding tendency to identify positive law with the state remains viable. The norms of custom or of supra-state organizations or of sub-state communities can be regarded as having been posited by the entities in which they originated. What is one to make of the stateless character of these norms and of the relationship between these norms and those laid down by the state? Should these different kinds of stateless law lead us to postulate a new pluralism about law? These are questions about the positivity of the law and or about the interaction of different kinds of positivities. Behind these questions lies a second and more basic issue: what is the relation between positive law of whatever kind and the ideas through which that law can become intelligible as a coherent normative system. With respect to private law, the theoretical constructs of correlativity and personality are relevant to this second issue. In what follows, I want to put aside the first issue and to focus on the significance of transsystemic law for the second and more basic issue. The transsystemic study of law is integral to the conception of the discipline outlined earlier. Under that conception the discipline of law ranges from the particularity of legal doctrine to the generality of the considerations that justify its doctrines and institutions. I have suggested that, to the extent of their coherence, the justificatory considerations pertinent to a liability regime can be understood in terms of the interrelated abstractions of correlativity and personality. However, one should not think, because correlativity and personality are interconnected abstractions that signify an ultimately uniform notion of justificatory coherence, that legal doctrine is similarly uniform. The opposite is true. Precisely because correlativity and personality are general and abstract, different systems of private law can manifest them in different ways. Although correlativity and personality are the stable theoretical constructs implicit in any regime of private law that values and aspires to its own justificatory coherence, they can have a variable content that is relative to a society’s particular tradition of positive law, to the history of its legal responses to given problems and to the shared social understandings that obtain and a given time and place. The contribution of the transsystemic study of law is that it illuminates the shifting and variable particularities of legal doctrine within a stable and general notion of justificatory coherence. As theoretical constructs rather than explicit components of a private law, the abstractions of correlativity and personality achieve specificity through the concepts, principles and rules of greater and lesser generality through which a given legal system strives to be coherent. Transsystemic study operates in both directions, casting light on both the particular and the general. On the one hand, transsystemic study alerts participants in the discipline to the variety of ways in which coherent doctrine can be formulated and to the presumptuousness of readily assuming the definitiveness or superiority of one’s own system. At the level of particular doctrine, it thereby fosters appreciation of the manifold possibilities that inhere in legal ordering. On the other hand, the very plurality of the legal systems that are the objects of scrutiny encourages attention to the generalizations that transcend the particularity of those systems. To the extent that those systems are coherent, the most general

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of the generalizations concerning the systems’ normative intelligibility are the theoretical constructs of correlativity and personality. Accordingly, the study of law across different jurisdictions and historical periods has an essential place within the discipline of law. Because that discipline focuses on law as a culture of justification, transsystemic study involves the comparison not merely of differing legal doctrines across systems, but of the justifications offered for differing doctrines, of the conceptual structures into which such justifications fit and of the adequacy of these conceptual structures to the underlying ideas of correlativity and personality. Such study can create awareness of the possible latitude for actualizing the constructs of correlativity and personality within legal practice, and thus of the particularities and contingencies of one’s own legal system. It also allows for an appreciation of the persistence of correlativity and personality in the structure of different legal systems, and thus of the existence of a distinctive mode of normative reasoning that transcends the particularities of different systems of private law and that constitutes the condition for the possibility of productive comparison among them. The theoretical constructs of correlativity and personality thereby serve as a framework for the comparison of legal doctrine across legal systems. Scholars of comparative law are divided about whether to emphasize the commonalities or the differences between legal systems.10 The theoretical constructs of correlativity and personality accommodate both commonality and difference. At the level of commonality they direct attention to the correlative structure of the parties’ relationship and to the corresponding conception of the person, and thus to the most pervasive characteristic of legal doctrine insofar as it is coherent. At the level of difference, they exhibit the diversity of the ways in which legal systems construct and actualize correlatively structured relationships. As theoretical ideas, correlativity and personality orient us within the conceptual space of coherent reasoning about legal doctrine. They thereby alert us to considerations that are inappropriate to a private law relationship because they are so structured that they could not possibly come within that space. However, they do not usurp the role of specific legal systems in working out the doctrines that are intelligible in their light. This allows the comparative examination of the different ways in which different legal systems formulate the doctrinal requirements of a common conceptual framework. IV. An Example: Unjust Enrichment Let me illustrate the matters discussed in the previous section by a specific example. The example involves unjust enrichment in the common law and in Jewish law. The use of Jewish law renders the example exotic, but also all the more valuable. Common law and Jewish law are radically different systems. They have independent origins and histories, different conceptual repertories and divergent ideological impulses. Unlike the common law, Jewish law traces its origin to a divine revelation whose implications are elaborated by human reason; its materials proceed casuistically rather than through an embedded taxonomy of rights and causes of action; and its prescriptions are more oriented towards delineating one’s responsibilities than to the creating of space for the exercise of autonomy. And it goes without saying that the common law and Jewish law have developed under widely divergent social and economic conditions and without opportunity for significant mutual influence. The common law deals with unrequested improvements in one’s property under the rubric of unjust enrichment. However, what makes an enrichment unjust is a notorious question. The best answer is that unjustness has two components.11 The first is that the enriching party made the enrichment without donative intent, because an enrichment intended as a gift is beyond recall. The second is that the recipient accepted the benefit as non-donatively given. Such acceptance refers not necessarily to a decision deliberately made but to a reasonable imputation. Acceptance merely signifies that the beneficial transfer is consonant with the recipient’s will. The incontrovertibility of the benefit, for instance, makes the recipient liable regardless of the recipient’s actual view of (or even knowledge of) the benefit, because the benefit’s incontrovertibility reflects 10 Daniel Visser, “Unjustified Enrichment in Comparative Perspective” in Matthias Reimann & Reinhold Zimmermann, eds, The Oxford Handbook of Comparative Law (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007) 969 at 972–73. 11 Weinrib, supra note 8 at 200–17.

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its consistency with the recipient’s projects and thus its consonance with the recipient’s will. The underlying idea is that the recipient cannot retain as a gift what was neither given nor accepted as a gift. This bilateral conception of unjustness exemplifies both correlativity and personality. It treats unjustness as correlatively structured, in that it situates the parties as transferor and transferee of the same non-donatively transferred benefit. Similarly, personality is in play because the parties are viewed as purposive beings interacting for their own contingent purposes unconstrained by any obligatory ends. Liability for unjust enrichment prevents the deprivation of what belongs to one unless one has freely parted with it. Accordingly, this basis of liability precludes the enriching party, who had no donative intent, from being treated as the donor of a gift, while also highlighting the consonance of the beneficial transfer with the recipient’s will. So understood, the relationship between the parties to a claim of unjust enrichment is a coherent expression of their interaction as free and purposive beings. Jewish law’s treatment of unrequested improvements to property exhibits similar ideas, but gives them its own distinctive twists.12 Common to the two systems is the linking of the parties through the enriching party’s lack of donative intent and the recipient’s acceptance of the benefit. The latter is particularly salient in the Jewish legal tradition. As the tradition evolved, the main issue became whether the owner was (to use the common law term) incontrovertibly benefited. Different views emerged concerning what constituted an incontrovertible benefit: the bringing of property to its optimal use, the improver’s anticipation of what the owner inevitably and necessarily would have done, and the increase in the property’s value without the owner’s having a bona fide reason for rejecting the benefit. Incontrovertible benefit, however formulated, was crucial to the basis of liability. Within this framework of absence of donative intent and acceptance, Jewish law diverged from its common law counterpart in several respects. First, the preoccupation of Jewish law with acceptance was the result of its different conception of donative intent. In the common law an improver who knows that the property belongs to another is not owed restitution. The common law imputes to such an improver awareness that only the owner can determine the use or condition of what is owned; improvement in the face of such knowledge is considered the giving of a gift. Accordingly, the claim will generally be dismissed on the ground that the claimant is a volunteer or officious intermeddler. In Jewish law, in contrast, a gift has to be intended as a gift; donative intent is not imputed from an awareness that the improved property belongs to another. This difference affects the terms on which the improver’s freedom is reconciled with the owner’s. Unlike the situation at common law, the improver’s claim in Jewish law will almost never be barred on the basis of his or her donative intent. This makes the owner’s acceptance the crucial issue that the law must work out. The correlative standing in unjust enrichment of acceptance and lack of donative intent means that restricting the scope of the latter expands the importance of the former. Second, from the standpoint of the common law, the narrowing of donative intent in Jewish law has a paradoxical implication: whereas for the common law the improver’s knowledge of another’s ownership weakens the improver’s claim, for Jewish law this knowledge strengthens it. When the value of the benefit exceeds the improver’s expenditure, the improver can recover the value of the benefit only if the improvement was made with such knowledge. The remuneration of an improver who acts on the mistaken impression that the property was his own is capped at the improver’s expenditure. The reason for this is that remuneration for the value of the benefit is conceived in quasi-contractual terms: the improver did what the owner would have done in any case. Only if the improver’s intention was to have the owner pay for his work can he claim that he did what the owner would have done anyway. Third, this quasi-contractual assumption shows that Jewish law does not clearly differentiate between contract and unjust enrichment. This is consistent with casuistic character of Jewish law, which starts from concrete situations rather than from a menu of abstractly formulated causes of action. Indeed, what the common law now identifies as unjust enrichment has in Jewish law not only contractual elements but also delictual ones. Since the fourteenth century, for instance, the jurisprudence of incontrovertible benefit has been based not on an independent notion of unjust enrichment (none explicitly exists in Jewish law) but on the idea that one is not allowed gratuitously to cause loss to another.

12 For a detailed treatment of the Jewish law of unrequested improvements, see ibid. at 230–62.

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Fourth, the upshot of these considerations is that Jewish law looks with apparent indifference on the knowing subjection of another to the expense of paying for unrequested improvements. In effect, the owner can be compelled to pay for improvements initiated by a stranger. This trenching on the autonomy of the owner to determine the use of his own property is unimaginable under the common law. Behind Jewish law’s relative indifference to the exclusive control of owners over their own property may lie a distinctive conception of property.13 In Jewish law, an owner’s exclusive right to the property is important not for itself but for the use to which property is put. What matters is not another’s intrusion into the owned space, but the benefit or detriment that the intrusion causes. Hence the central question for unrequested improvements is whether the benefit is one that the owner would have wanted in any case. Be that as it may, the example illustrates the way that transsystemic attention to law illuminates both the variable particulars of legal doctrine and the more general and more stable normative ideas that the doctrine instantiates. Any rational treatment of claims in unjust enrichment must attempt fairly and coherently to accommodate the interplay between the freedom of owners to use their property for their own purposes and the improver’s claim to remuneration for the benefit bestowed on another. To this end, both the common law and Jewish law combine the improver’s non-donative intent and the recipient’s acceptance of the beneficial transfer. Both systems thereby link the parties through their correlative situations as transferor and transferee of a non-donatively given benefit, while also treating the parties’ relationship as the locus of free and purposive interaction. In so reflecting correlativity and personality, the common law and Jewish law give voice to a shared conception of the juridical. Nonetheless the systems have different doctrines and different modes of thought. In particular, although both systems assign significance to the presence or absence of donative intent, they understand donativeness in different ways. Consequently, the two systems diverge both in their treatment of unrequested improvements and in the texture of the conceptual apparatus that underpins it. V. Conclusion: The Future of the Discipline The rise of globalization (and of legal arrangements that reflect it) renders the state-transcending aspects of law especially urgent in the contemporary world. The question posed in this volume is how the stateless aspect of law affects the future of the discipline. Although the increasing presence of stateless law suggests new questions about the relationships between various systems and layers of law, the discipline’s basic thrust, to enquire into the intelligibility of law’s normative nature, remains intact. If anything, the proliferation of forms of law gives new scope to this enterprise. Over the centuries, and especially since the onset of modernity, this enterprise has been identified with an enquiry into ius or right. Originally conceived in Roman law as the whole of law originating from various sources, and thus distinguished from the specificity of lex, ius already in Roman times bore as one of its meanings ‘that which is always right and good’.14 By the time the word emerged in modern jurisprudential writing, ius had become identified with the normative intelligibility of legal ordering. This intelligibility included the subjective rights, especially rights to property and contractual performance, expressive of juridical freedom in each person’s interaction with another. It also included the totality into which these rights fit, that is, the notion of an objective normative order that provides the public and systematic framework of values and institutions within which those rights operated. Ius thus referred to what I earlier termed the two normative aspects – the relational and the institutional – that are the objects of exploration by the discipline of law. And the two theoretical constructs mentioned earlier – correlativity and personality – are merely the most abstract distillations of the terms in which ius was conceptualized. Over the last two centuries this tradition has been eclipsed by the rise of positivism and the concomitant identification of law with the product of particular state organs. Lex superseded ius. Or rather, instead of being understood within the ius’s framework of a distinctive juridical normativity, lex became the self-sufficient 13 I owe this point to conversation with Benny Porat of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. 14 ‘[I]d quod semper aequum ac bonum est ius dicitur’ (Dig 1.1.11 (Paulus)); see Adolf Berger, Encyclopedic Dictionary of Roman Law (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1953) sub verbo “ius”.

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product of authoritative state action. Concurrently, the inquiry into the justifications for particular legal arrangements was no longer regarded as immanent to the law as a normative order, but was consigned to the open-ended consideration of morality at large. By undermining the identification of law with the state, the emergence of stateless law may contribute to the re-emergence of the older tradition of enquiry that centred on ius. If so, attention to the law apart from its immediate connection to particular states would lead not merely to an awareness of different kinds of positivity, but also to consideration of the conditions for the normative intelligibility of legal ordering as such, and of the degree to which the various kinds of positive law manifest this intelligibility. In this sense, the exploration of stateless law may involve a journey back to the future.

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Chapter 5

Law as an Academic Discipline

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Hanoch Dagan*

I. Introduction Although the vast majority of law school graduates are practising lawyers (or judges), the place of law schools at universities is never questioned. Law schools are clearly professional schools charged with the task of conveying the knowledge, the skills and also the ethical commitments germane to the legal vocation. But is law really an academic discipline? At first glance, the answer is obviously yes. Law is definitely a branch of learning and scholarly instruction,1 displaying many of the characteristic indicia of academic disciplines such as academic journals and learned societies. And yet, notwithstanding its proud career as part of the modern university, legal academia faces a serious disciplinary challenge. For traditional doctrinal analysis, the challenge is distinguishing legal scholarship from high-skilled performance by non-academic members of the legal profession.2 The various ‘Law and … ’ schools, which use ‘the methods of scientific and humanistic inquiry to enlarge our knowledge of the legal system’,3 face a mirror image of the same challenge. If law has no meaning except that which it absorbs from other disciplines and enquiries, is it ‘a discipline in its own right’?4 My question in this chapter is whether law is an autonomous academic discipline, distinct and separate from neighbouring fields or merely an object of academic research that borrows its conceptual framework from the humanities or the social sciences.5 The choice between these two alternatives – and a possible third, middle position – is important both as such and as the foundation of a critical analysis of specific institutional arrangements concerning such issues as professional associations, specialized journals and, most notably, advanced legal education. This chapter investigates the two extreme alternatives of autonomy and assimilation and offers a preliminary account of a midway position, claiming that relevant lessons from the social sciences and the humanities are always potentially relevant to law but never exhaust the theoretical inquiry of it. Past and current theories of law’s autonomy do not fully account for the necessary extra-doctrinal underpinnings of legal materials, nor do they sufficiently appreciate the justificatory burden entailed by the prospective effects of every significant legal pronouncement. These shortcomings, however, do not imply the collapse of law as an academic enterprise robust enough to justify a separate category. Using the theories and methods of other disciplines definitely enriches our understanding of law, but these helpful exercises never suffice because they do not pay appropriate attention to the nature of law as a set of coercive normative institutions and, furthermore, tend to fragment rather than synthesize the interdisciplinary lessons on law. * Thanks to Mark Alexander, Moshe Cohen-Eliya, Chris Eisgruber, Paul Frymer, Michele Graziadei, Daphna Hacker, Sharon Hannes, Ron Harris, Stanley Katz, Shelly Kreiczer-Levy, Roy Kreitner, Tami Kricheli Katz, Sudhir Krishnaswamy, Martin Laughlin, Nathaniel Persily, Ariel Porat, Iddo Porat, Amit Pundik, Arianne Ranan-Barzilai, Anthea Roberts, AnneMarie Slaughter, Alexander Somek, Hillel Sommer, Neta Ziv and participants at the McGill Faculty of Law’s Conference on Stateless Law? The Future of the Discipline, a LAPA Workshop at Princeton University and the 2012 Conference of the Israeli Law and Society Association for their helpful comments. I also thank Tom Binkovitch for research assistance and the Cegla Center for the Interdisciplinary Research of the Law for financial support. 1 The Oxford English Dictionary, 2d ed, sub verbo “discipline”. 2 See e.g. Douglas W Vick, “Interdisciplinarity and the Discipline of Law” (2004) 31 JL & Soc’y 163 at 187. 3 Richard A Posner, “The Decline of Law as an Autonomous Discipline: 1962–1987” (1987) 100 Harv L Rev 761 at 779. 4 Ernest J Weinrib, “Can Law Survive Legal Education?” (2007) 60 Vand L Rev 401 at 429 [Weinrib, “Can Law Survive?”]. 5 This focus should explain why this chapter will not study the history and sociology of the relationship between law and its neighbouring disciplines. 1

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Legal theory compensates for both these limitations by focusing on the work of society’s coercive normative institutions and through its synthetic character. Legal theory, the core identifier of law as an academic discipline, studies the traditions of these institutions and the craft typical of their members while continuously challenging their outputs by demonstrating their contingency and testing their desirability. When performing these tasks, legal theory necessarily resorts to law’s neighbouring disciplines. At its best, however, legal theory is more than a sophisticated synthesis of relevant insights from these friendly neighbours, because legal theory is consciously reflective on persistent jurisprudential questions regarding the nature of law, notably the relationship between law’s normativity and its coerciveness, given law’s institutional and structural characteristics. II. Of Autonomy and Assimilation A. From Classical Formalism … Any discussion of the modern notion of law as an autonomous academic discipline (at least in the US) must begin with Christopher Columbus Langdell of Harvard Law School, who culturally personifies classical formalism. Some claim that this conventional portrayal of Langdell et al. is a caricature.6 But this historical debate is beside the point here, given both the revival of American legal formalism among some judges and scholars7 and the European attempts to rehabilitate doctrinalism, understood as a ‘quest’ for ‘systematic coherence’ through ‘the development of general concepts and structures and the perception of these as internal to and operative within the legal system’.8 Furthermore, doctrinalism seems alive and kicking given ‘the ubiquitous practice, especially in the United States, of accusing judges who have reached substantively disagreeable results in appellate cases of having committed technical legal errors or “mistakes”, rather than of simply having the wrong substantive views’.9 In formalism, law is governed by a set of fundamental and logically demonstrable principles.10 Two interrelated features of the formalist conception of law bear emphasis: the purported autonomy and closure of the legal world and the predominance of formal logic within this autonomous universe.11 Law, on this view, is ‘an internally valid, autonomous, and self-justifying science’ in which right answers are ‘derived from the autonomous, logical working out of the system’.12 Law is composed of concepts and rules. With respect to legal concepts, formalism endorses ‘a Platonic or Aristotelian theory’, according to which ‘a concept delineates the essence of a species or natural kind’.13 Legal rules, in turn, embedded either in statutes or in case law, are also capable of determining logically necessary legal answers. Induction can reduce the amalgam of statutes and case law to a limited number of principles, and lawyers can then provide right answers to every case that may arise using syllogistic reasoning – classifying the new case into one of these fundamental pigeonholes and

 6 See Anthony J Sebok, Legal Positivism in American Jurisprudence (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1998) at 83–104; Brian Z Tamanaha, Beyond the Formalist-Realist Divide: The Role of Politics in Judging (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010) at chs 2–6.  7 See e.g. Antonin Scalia, A Matter of Interpretation (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997) at 25; “Symposium: Formalism Revisited” (1999) 66 U Chicago L Rev 527.  8 Armin von Bogdandy, “The Past and Promise of Doctrinal Constructivism: A Strategy for Responding to the Challenge Facing Constitutional Scholarship in Europe” (2009) 7 International Journal of Constitutional Law 364 at 376–9. See also Armin von Bogdandy, “Founding Principles” in Armin von Bogdandy & Jürgen Bast, eds, Principles of European Law, 2d ed (Oxford: Hart, 2009) 11 at 14–18, 26.  9 Frederick Schauer, “Legal Realism Untamed”, Virginia Public Law and Legal Theory Research Paper No 2012–38, online: Social Science Research Network at 10. 10 See Neil Duxbury, Patterns of American Jurisprudence (Oxford: Clarendon, 1995) at 10; Paul D Carrington, “Hail! Langdell!” (1995) 20 Law & Soc Inq 691 at 709–10. 11 See Thomas C Grey, “The New Formalism”, Stanford Law School, Public Law and Legal Series, Working Paper No 4, online: Social Science Research Network at 5–6. 12 Richard H Pildes, “Forms of Formalism” (1999) 66 U Chicago L Rev 607 at 608–9. 13 Grey, supra note 11 at 11.

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deducing correct outcomes.14 Thus, law is perceived as a comprehensive and rigorously structured doctrinal science, which can generate determinate and internally valid right answers; it need not resort to any social goals or human values and is thus strictly independent of the social sciences and the humanities.15 However, as legal realists have demonstrated, not only is such doctrinalism an inaccurate description of adjudication, but the indeterminacy and manipulability of the formalist techniques for divining the one essential meaning of legal concepts and deducing outcomes from legal rules render pure doctrinalism a conceptual impossibility.16 Admittedly, as H.L.A. Hart claimed, the indeterminacy of discrete doctrinal sources is limited: the gap between language and reality does not mean that there are no easy cases for the application of a given legal rule.17 But realism views legal doctrine as hopelessly indeterminate not (or, at least, not primarily) because of the indeterminacy of discrete doctrinal sources. Rather, the indeterminacy of legal doctrine derives first and foremost from the multiplicity of doctrinal materials potentially applicable at each juncture in any given case.18 Since legal norms are ‘in the habit of hunting in pairs’19 – because legal doctrine always offers at least ‘two buttons’ between which a choice must be made – none of the doctrine’s answers to problems is preordained or inevitable.20 Thus, Karl Llewellyn claims that ‘all legal systems’ are patchworks of contradictory premises covered by ‘ill-disguised inconsistency’, because we find in all of them that ‘a variety of strands, only partly consistent with one another, exist side by side’.21 Any given legal doctrine, including the one guiding the lawyers’ interpretative activity (the canons of interpretation), suggests ‘at least two opposite tendencies’ at every point.22 For (almost) every case, then, there are opposite doctrinal sources that need to be accommodated: a rule and an exception (frequently vague), or a seemingly precise rule and a vague standard (such as good faith or reasonableness) that is also potentially applicable. The availability of such a multiplicity of sources on any given legal question, all of which can be either expanded or contracted, results in profound and irreducible doctrinal indeterminacy.23 Similarly, the idea of inevitable entailments from legal concepts is also false, because the elaboration of any legal concept can choose from a broad menu of possible alternatives.24 The heterogeneity of contemporary understandings regarding any given legal concept (e.g., property or contract) 14 See e.g. Duxbury, supra note 10 at 15; Morton Horwitz, The Transformation of American Law, 1870–1960 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977) at 16–18. 15 See Horwitz, ibid. at 9–10, 15, 198–9; Carrington, supra note 10 at 707–8. 16 The following summary of the realist critique draws on Hanoch Dagan, Reconstructing American Legal Realism & Rethinking Private Law Theory (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013) [Dagan, Reconstructing]. The descriptive and conceptual claims discussed in the text give rise to the realist normative criticism of legal formalism, i.e., that it serves as a means to mask normative choices and fabricate professional authority. 17 See HLA Hart, The Concept of Law (Clarendon Press, 1961) 123 at 141–2, 144. 18 See Karl N Llewellyn, “Some Realism about Realism” in Jurisprudence: Realism in Theory and in Practice (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962) 42 at 58 [Llewellyn, “Some Realism”]; Felix S Cohen, “The Problems of Functional Jurisprudence” in Lucy Kramer Cohen, ed, The Legal Conscience: Selected Papers of Felix S Cohen (Newhaven, Conn: Yale University Press, 1960) 77 at 83. See also Edward A Purcell Jr, The Crisis of Democratic Theory: Scientific Naturalism and the Problem of Value (Lexington, Ky: University Press of Kentucky, 1973) at 90; Andrew Altman, “Legal Realism, Critical Legal Studies, and Dworkin” (1986) 15 Philosophy & Public Affairs 205. To clarify: realists do not deny that legal doctrine as such rules out many – indeed most – options. They merely insist that there will always remain more than one option that can apply doctrinally. 19 Walter Wheeler Cook, Book Review of The Paradoxes of Legal Science by Benjamin Nathan Cardozo, (1929) 38 Yale LJ 405 at 406. 20 Fred Rodell, Woe Unto You, Lawyers! (New York: Reynal & Hitchcock, 1939) at 154, 160. See also Jerome Frank, Law and the Modern Mind (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2009) at 138; John Dewey, “Logical Method and Law” in William W Fisher III, Morton J Horwitz & Thomas A Reed, eds, American Legal Realism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993) 185 at 192 [Dewey, “Logical Method”]; Llewellyn, “Some Realism”, supra note 18 at 70. 21 Karl N Llewellyn, The Case Law System in America, edited by Paul Gerwitz, translated by Michael Ansaldi (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1933) [Llewellyn, Case Law]. This critique was picked up by Roberto Unger: see Roberto M Unger, The Critical Legal Studies Movement (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1983) at 15–22. 22 See Karl N Llewellyn, “Remarks on the Theory of Appellate Decision and the Rules or Canons about How Statutes Are to Be Construed” (1950) 3 Vand L Rev 395. 23 See Llewellyn, Case Law, supra note 21 at 51. 24 Felix S Cohen, “Transcendental Nonsense and the Functional Approach” (1935) 35 Colum L Rev 809 at 820–21, 827–9 [Cohen, “Transcendental Nonsense”]. See also Horwitz, supra note 14 at 202.

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within and outside any given jurisdiction, as well as the wealth of additional alternatives that legal history offers, defies the formalist quest for conceptual essentialism.25 To clarify: this critique of doctrinal determinacy need not challenge the felt predictability of the doctrine at a given time and place. Contending that legal doctrine qua doctrine cannot constrain decision-makers is compatible with an appreciation of the significant measure of predictability generated by the convergence of lawyers’ background understandings.26 Thus, the realist claim need not threaten conventional understandings of legal professionalism.27 But by insisting that such predictability does not inhere in the doctrine as such and rests instead on the broader social practice of law,28 realists discredit the claim that ‘the discovery of the principles from the cases’ can similarly be the gist of law as an academic discipline.29 B. … to the Disciplinary Analysis of Law The demise of classical formalism opens up a rich, interdisciplinary research agenda for legal scholars. If doctrinalism is only conventionally stable, academic lawyers must be oriented to the human ends served by law. And as Oliver Wendell Holmes famously claimed, providing reasons that refer to such social ends is bound to extract legal discourse from its disciplinary solitude. Jurists have to study ‘the ends sought to be attained and the reasons for desiring them’, and this inquiry necessitates the introduction of insights and methods from other disciplines into the legal discourse.30 Carrying out the tasks on this agenda, according to Roscoe Pound, calls for ‘“team-work” between jurisprudence and the other social sciences’.31 Pound insisted that jurists must take account of the ‘social facts’ to which various legal institutions apply, evaluate ‘the actual social effects of legal institutions and legal doctrines’, and choose among competing alternatives according to the desirability of their realization’s actual consequences. This emphasis on the social effects of law and on the means for producing these effects, he argued, must become the courts’ interpretive strategy, the proper way of preparing legislation within the legislative branch and an important focus of legal history.32 As Felix Cohen succinctly described it, this prevalent form of post-realist legal discourse shifts legal discourse ‘away from the attempt to systematize and compare’ legal doctrine, or ‘from concern with the genesis and evolution’ of law, toward ‘a study of the consequences … in terms of human motivation and social structure’.33 It moves away from the lawyer–craftsman standards of ‘legal beauty or finesse’ toward ‘concrete human values’ and ‘the effects of law upon human desires and feelings’.34 For many legal scholars, this shift is a matter of degree but in its extreme version policy swallows law. Thus, as early as 1934, Edward Robinson described law as ‘an unscientific science’ and urged lawyers – especially academic lawyers – to become scientific by discarding law’s ‘conservative logic’ and applying social scientific methods to the practical solution of socio-legal problems.35 A little more than 50 years later, Richard Posner has happily reported ‘the decline of law as an autonomous discipline’ and the boom in ‘the conscious 25 See e.g. Hanoch Dagan, The Law and Ethics of Restitution (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2004) at 221–4, 315–16; Hanoch Dagan, Property: Values and Institutions, part 1 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011) [Dagan, Property: Values and Institutions]. 26 See e.g. Larry Alexander & Emily Sherwin, The Rule of Rules (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001) at 32–4. 27 C.f. JE Penner, “Decent Burial for Dead Concepts” (2010) 58 Curr Legal Probs 313 at 314. 28 See Frederick Schauer, ed, “Editor’s Introduction” in Karl N Llewellyn, The Theory of Rules (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011) at 1, 5, 7–8, 18, 20–24. See also Margaret Jane Radin, “Reconsidering the Rule of Law” (1989) 69 BUL Rev 781 at 803. 29 See Stephen M Feldman, “The Transformation of an Academic Discipline: Law Professors in the Past and Future (or Toy Story Too)” (2004) 54 J Legal Educ 471 at 476–80. 30 Oliver W Holmes, “The Path of the Law” in Oliver W Holmes, The Collected Legal Papers (Mineola, NY: Dover, 2007) 167 at 184, 187–9, 195 [Holmes, “Path of the Law”]. 31 Roscoe Pound, “The Scope and Purpose of Sociological Jurisprudence” (1912) 25 Harv L Rev 489 at 510, 512–6. 32 Ibid. 33 Cohen, “Transcendental Nonsense”, supra note 24 at 830. 34 Felix S Cohen, “Modern Ethics and the Law” (1934) 4 Brook L Rev 33 at 49–50 [Cohen, “Modern Ethics”]. 35 See Edward S Robinson, “Law – An Unscientific Science” (1934) 44 Yale LJ 235 at 236–9, 256, 264.

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application of other disciplines, such as political and moral philosophy and economics, to traditional legal problems’.36 Posner observed ‘the rise of [these] other disciplines to positions where they can rival the law’s claim to privileged insight into its subject matter’, and concluded that ‘it seems unlikely that we shall soon (if ever) return to a serene belief in the law’s autonomy’.37 This proposition may be undisputed (as I will try to argue below), but Posner goes further and offers a definition of legal theory that openly perceives law as merely a context for applying methods from other disciplines and calling for the proper adjustment of advanced legal education and of academic law journals.38 At this stage, readers may assume that my paradigmatic case of the assimilationist strategy is the economic analysis of law, but a very similar description applies to other contemporary schools that draw on other disciplines, such as history and sociology. Practitioners in these schools seek to establish sufficient distance from the law and its carriers, which would release legal academics from dependence on their objects of study. Thus, they tend to eschew normative impulses and refrain from attempts at solving concrete social problems through law. Taken to its logical endpoint, this position raises serious doubts about the very possibility of law as an academic discipline, with its advocates insisting on a sharp distinction between their own academic discourse – including its language, method, audience and goals – and instrumental orientations they associate with practical legal discourse and their policy-concerned brethren.39 Indeed, while the cumulative work of various ‘Law and … ’ schools has contributed immensely to our understanding of law, its approach seems to be typified by a view of ‘law as a parasitic discipline’.40 Many (most?) practitioners in these schools take the theory or methodology of another discipline to explain legal doctrine, criticize it or call for its reform without referring, either explicitly or implicitly, to the concept of law or to the possible ramifications of law’s constitutive characteristics for their proposed explanation, critique or reform. At times, their participation in this exercise, given that they usually lack academic credentials in the discipline they use, is justified by the fact that they ‘bring perspectives, knowledge, and sensitivities’.41 But taken to its logical conclusion, ‘[t]he appearance of the law ands is part of the story of the displacement and disintegration of the prevailing [doctrinalist] creed, and its replacement with an arena of competing programs’.42 It was from this perspective that George Priest claimed that ‘legal scholarship has become specialized according to the separate social sciences’ so that a law school should be structured as ‘a set of miniature graduate departments in the various disciplines’.43 Priest argued that, given the dominance of these other disciplines, it is difficult to justify ‘why law is a subject worthy of study at all’ and, furthermore, he denied even the usefulness of ‘extensive knowledge of the intricacies of legal doctrine and legal argument’.44 Priest’s proposal seems blunt, but is it indeed so remote from the contemporary scene of (American) legal academia? Contemporary US law school culture seems to offer two alternatives: adopt an external academic discipline (such as economics, philosophy, history, sociology or psychology) or relinquish academic or scientific pretensions and delve more deeply into practical professionalism.45 This sense of ‘no academic core’ and the consequent fragmentation of legal academia have at least three significant institutional manifestations: 36 Posner, supra note 3 at 769. 37 Ibid. at 772. 38 Ibid. at 778–9. 39 See Meir Dan-Cohen, “Listeners and Eavesdroppers: Substantive Legal Theory and Its Audience” (1992) 63 U Colo L Rev 569 at 579–89. See also Paul W Kahn, The Cultural Study of Law: Reconstructing Legal Scholarship (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999) at 18; Austin Sarat & Jonathan Simon, “Cultural Analysis, Cultural Studies, and the Situation of Legal Scholarship” in Austin Sarat & Jonathan Simon, eds, Cultural Analysis, Cultural Studies, and the Law: Moving Beyond Legal Realism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003) 1 at 3–6. 40 Anthony Bradney, “Law as a Parasitic Discipline” (1988) 25 JL & Soc’y 71. 41 Ron Harris, “Legal Scholars, Economists, and the Interdisciplinary Study of Institutions” (2011) 96 Cornell L Rev 789 at 808. See also Feldman, supra note 29 at 494–5. 42 Marc Galanter & Mark Alan Edwards, “The Path of the Law Ands” [1997] Wis L Rev 375 at 376. 43 George L Priest, “Social Science Theory and Legal Education: The Law School as University” (1983) 33 J Legal Educ 437 at 437 [Priest, “Social Science Theory”]. 44 Priest, “Social Science Theory”, supra note 43 at 438–41. 45 See Mattias Kumm, “On the Past and Future of European Constitutional Scholarship” (2009) 7 International Journal of Constitutional Law 401 at 410–12. Later, Priest added that interdisciplinarity does not imply the neglect of legal doctrine, but even his later writings attest that, by ‘interdisciplinary research’, Priest in fact meant research that uses

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(1) The two most important professional associations of American academic lawyers – the American Law and Economics Association and the Law and Society Association – are not organized according to thematic alliances but rather according to their common reliance on another discipline or disciplines.46 (2) Four of the five highest-ranked law journals in the ‘Jurisprudence and Legal Theory’ category are related to these two other-discipline(s)-based associations.47 And, probably the most significant, (3) although American law schools increasingly favour faculty members with doctoral degrees in other disciplines,48 they generally have no pretence of supplying sustained academic training for their own scholars.49 The typical curriculum for gaining advanced degrees in law (both LL.M. and J.S.D./S.J.D.) in American law schools usually includes courses selected from the J.D. curriculum and adds few, if any, methodological or theoretical required courses.50 If law has no theoretical core, these developments seem appropriate and indeed commendable. ‘As the disciplines broadened their scope, the overlap became so great that topical distinctions were rendered utterly meaningless … [and the] distinction between the disciplines shifted from what they study to how they study it’.51 Thus, if ‘[t]he best reason for the existence of law schools as separate entities (in addition to the professional training they provide students) is … that it makes great sense for people interested in a common set of problems and institutions to work in a common environment in order to share knowledge of what is a complex set of social institutions’,52 then the study of law should be understood similarly to that of area studies and law schools are destined to become (or remain) loose coalitions of distinct and fragmented subdisciplines, whose only common denominator is their interest in law. Readers who share my sense that such an endgame would entail a real intellectual loss must realize that their opposition to this vision can be justified if, but only if, they can identify some theoretical and/or methodological core of law as an academic discipline rather than merely as perspectives, knowledge and sensitivities. the methodology of another discipline. See George L Priest, “The Growth of Interdisciplinary Research and the Industrial Structure of Legal Ideas: A Reply to Judge Edwards” (1993) 91 Mich L Rev 1929 at 1936. 46 See American Law and Economics Association, online: ALEA and the Law and Society Association, online: LSA . 47 These are the Journal of Empirical Legal Studies, The Journal of Legal Studies, Law & Social Inquiry, and Law & Society Review. For rankings, see the Washington and Lee School of Law Library, online: WLU . (The other law journal in this prestigious group – which is ranked third – is Theoretical Inquiries in Law.) 48 For an extreme manifestation of this practice, see David E Van Zandt, “Discipline-Based Faculty” (2003) 53 J Legal Educ 332 at 335. 49 Yale Law School’s PhD in Law Program promises to be an exception, providing ‘an alternate path into law teaching alongside existing routes such as fellowships, advanced degrees in cognate fields, and transitioning directly from practice or clerkships’. At the core of this programme’s coursework is ‘a two-semester pro-seminar on canonical legal scholarship and methodologies’. But other than that, a student may take relevant courses offered within the law school or at other university departments. PhD students at Yale will have to complete two qualifying examinations; the first, written exam will measure ‘the breadth of a student’s knowledge’, whereas the second, oral exam ‘is an opportunity to demonstrate mastery of the candidate’s area of specialization’. See Yale Law School, “Ph.D. Program”, online: . 50 See e.g. Yale Law School, “Degree Programs”, online: ; University of Chicago Law School, “Prospective Students”, online: . Harvard Law School requires SJD students in their first year to follow an ‘approved study plan’ of courses, readings and other academic work, which ‘should be organized around three or four fields chosen with reference to the candidate’s dissertation proposal and future teaching plans’. See Harvard Law School, “S.J.D. Programs of Study”, online: . But even there, no canonical course of legal theory is required. The only rigorously structured advanced degree programmes that I could trace in the US were specialized. See e.g. Stanford Law School’s Program in International Legal Studies: “SPILS”, online: and Berkeley Law – University of California, “PhD Program (JSP)”, online: . The predicament of parallel programmes in other leading English-speaking universities is not very different. See e.g. Oxford University Faculty of Law, “Taught Postgraduate Courses”, online: ; University of Cambridge Faculty of Law, online: ; University of Toronto Faculty of Law, “Graduate Programs”, online: ; McGill University Faculty of Law, “Advanced Programs in Law”, online: . 51 Kenneth T Grieb, “Area Studies and the Traditional Disciplines” (1974) 7:2 The History Teacher 228 at 231–32. 52 Van Zandt, supra note 48 at 334.

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C. … and Back to Formalism? Ernest Weinrib’s ambitious and sophisticated effort to reclaim the autonomy of law as an academic discipline should be read against this background. Weinrib is a harsh critic of this ‘interdisciplinary turn’, which he describes as ‘the most dramatic development in legal education over the last generation’.53 While congratulating the ‘brillian[t] mobiliz[ation of] the insights of other disciplines … to the analysis of legal material’, Weinrib argues that if ‘[l]aw provides only the authoritative form into which the conclusions of non-legal thinking are translated’, legal scholarship becomes no more than ‘the application of a particular non-legal discipline to examples drawn from the law’.54 Focusing on private law, Weinrib laments this predicament and insists that it is the inevitable outcome of the structure of instrumentalist academic inquiry that prevails in contemporary legal academy. ‘Regardless of the goal it advances, an instrumentalist analysis of private law mischaracterizes its object’ because ‘it imports outside goals for immanent concepts of private law’, ‘it ignores the relationship between a plaintiff and a defendant’ and ‘it wrongly converts all private law into public law’.55 Weinrib’s project, then, is to elucidate law’s ‘independent voice’, which can be a proper object of university study and in respectful conversation with other disciplines.56 This voice ‘is inevitably concerned with the activity of “judges, legislators, and practitioners”’.57 Weinrib’s specific prescription is provocative. Alongside the rejection of the instrumentalist framework that ‘inevitably mischaracterizes’ private law, ‘obscuring the law’s distinctive character’, ‘[t]he primary task of the university study of private law – what it should do, whatever else it does – is to enquire into’ the ‘special character of private law’.58 This character, Weinrib explains, is ‘an ideal construct that makes the particulars of the practice of private law intelligible in the light of the practice’s most general and pervasive features’.59 As such, it cannot be challenged by the sheer fact that positive law’s treatment of a particular problem is out of line. Quite the contrary: such cases evidence ‘law’s self-critical commitment to “work itself pure”’, because the character of private law then ‘provides the standpoint, internal to private law as a whole, from which to criticize the particular legal arrangement’.60 Only in this way can law as an academic discipline ‘both [maintain] its continuity with the legal practice, which is its starting point, and yet [go] beyond that practice to disclose its implicit structural and normative ideas’.61 Weinrib argues that in order to understand private law’s ‘implicit structural and normative ideas … particular attention should be paid to aspects of private law that are already general’, namely, ‘the institutional

53 Weinrib, “Can Law Survive?”, supra note 4, at 403–4. For another attempt to reject any form of instrumentalism and divine law’s autonomy, which focuses on public – in particular international – law, see Martti Koskenniemi, “Constitutionalism as Mindset: Reflections on Kantian Themes about International Law and Globalization” (2007) 8 Theor Inq L 9. Koskenniemi conceptualizes constitutionalism as ‘a programme of moral and political regeneration’ in search of ‘validity beyond the inclinations of the speaker’, which focuses ‘on the practice of professional judgment in applying’ the laws, rather than on ‘the functional needs or interests [they] may seek to advance’, making ‘jurists rather than positive rules … law’s nucleus, as educators and enlighteners’ (ibid. at 11, 18, 33). He thus understands ‘law as a crystallization of personal virtue’ and celebrates ‘the constitutional mindset that is not a priori bound up with any determinate institution, a mindset building on a tradition understood from a Kantian perspective as a project of “freedom”’ (ibid. at 23, 33). Although this account is substantively quite different from Weinrib’s, being inspired by the European constitutional experience rather than by the private law tradition of the common law, it still seems vulnerable, mutatis mutandis, to much of my critique of Weinrib. 54 Weinrib, “Can Law Survive?”, supra note 4 at 410–11. 55 Ibid. at 428–37. 56 Ibid. 57 Ibid. 58 Ibid. at 415–16, 437. To be sure, Weinrib admits that instrumentalism, even in its bluntest form of economic analysis, ‘may lodge itself within the practice through the influence of … scholarship on judges, who then apply it in their judgments’ (ibid. at 410, n 18). He acknowledges that ‘[t]o the extent that this occurs, the disjunction between academic study and legal practice is lessened’ (ibid.). But he insists that this would raise an ‘ultimately more serious problem’ – namely, ‘a disjunction internal to the legal practice’ – between ‘law’s fundamental concepts and relational structure’ and the instrumentalist analysis (ibid.). 59 Ibid. 60 Ibid. 61 Ibid.

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nexus’ between ‘a particular plaintiff and a particular defendant’.62 Thus, for private law ‘to be understood as a normatively coherent practice, the justification for liability in any particular case has to reflect the structure of this linkage’.63 This ‘bipolar’ logic of private law adjudication, understood as a unique forum for the vindication of infringed rights, implies both that the reasons underlying the plaintiff’s right be the same as the reasons that justify the defendant’s duty, and that these reasons also explain the specific remedy inflicted on the defendant. This injunction of ‘correlativity’ is robust: because ‘correlativity marks the character of private law as a distinctive normative order’, it ‘excludes considerations, no matter how appealing … which break apart the relationship between the parties by invoking social goals that operate on one or the other of them and on persons who are similarly situated’.64 Thus, for Weinrib, correlativity leaves no room for any social value since ‘no combination of [such] one-sided considerations can produce a correlatively-structured justification’.65 Weinrib happily endorses ‘correlativity as the most general structuring idea immanent in [legal] practice’ (and the one which makes private law ‘categorically different from public law’) because it manifests the character of private law ‘as the juridical realization of a bipolar normativity in which one purposive being is directly related to another through a system of rights and their correlative duties’.66 Indeed, ‘correlativity presupposes an abstract conception of the interacting parties’, in which they ‘are viewed as exercising the capacity for purposive action, whatever might be their particular purposes’.67 In this way, ‘the parties are equal, in that they are both treated as the loci of self-determining freedom; and they are free, in that neither is subordinated to the unilateral purposiveness of the other’.68 Weinrib’s claim that law, as an academic discipline, must account for its constitutive features, as well as his more particular assertion regarding the significance of correlativity to private law, are both convincing and significant. Law is a coercive mechanism, which means that it must also be a justificatory practice. Given that private law has a specific structure, judges should be able to justify to defendants all aspects of their statemandated power, including, as Weinrib helpfully emphasizes, both the identity of the party benefiting from any liability imposed on them, and the type and magnitude of that liability.69 But Weinrib’s further contention – that correlativity exhausts ‘the legal perspective’ on private law so that ‘[its] distinctiveness excludes other perspectives’, although it ‘does not deny their authority within their own spheres’ – cannot stand.70 The first difficulty with this declaration of independence is that, at least in many areas of private law, correlativity and the attendant ideal of equality of formal freedom must rely on social values. Weinrib, to be sure, denies this reliance on values, which in his view must be excluded from legal discourse. Accordingly, he derives the thesis of private law autonomy from the correlativity requirement by relying on the idea of property. Property, in this view, serves as a benchmark requiring no reference to collective values: while voluntary changes in the distribution of property cannot generate any legitimate grievance, involuntary changes both justify owners’ complaints and specify the appropriate remedial response.71 But for property to serve as such a safe haven for private law autonomy, Weinrib must defend a conception of property that is securely detached from social values. Weinrib faces this challenge by advancing a regime in which the state functions both as a guarantor of people’s pre-social and robust property rights against one another, and as the authority responsible for levying taxes ‘in order to fulfill a public duty to support the poor’.72 Strong property rights and a viable welfare state, he claims, cluster as a matter of conceptual necessity.73

62 Ibid. at 418–25. 63 Ibid. 64 Ibid. 65 Ibid. 66 Ibid. 67 Ibid. 68 Ibid. 69 See e.g. Dagan, Reconstructing, supra note 16. 70 Weinrib, “Can Law Survive?”, supra note 4 at 430. 71 See e.g. Ernest J Weinrib, “Restitutionary Damages as Corrective Justice” (2000) 1 Theor Inq L 1 at 6–7, 12, 24. 72 Ernest J Weinrib, Corrective Justice, ch 8: “Poverty and Property in Kant’s System of Rights” (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). 73 Ibid.

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But such a strict division of labour between a libertarian private law and a robust welfare state wherein the threat of dependence is universally alleviated is quite implausible. As I show elsewhere, the public law of tax and redistribution is unlikely to supplement private law with rules adequately remedying the injustices of a libertarian private law, if not in terms of distribution at least in terms of interpersonal dependence. The realities of interest group politics in the promulgation of tax legislation render egalitarian tax regimes, such as one based on Rawls’s difference principle, a matter of political theory rather than of empirical reality. This difficulty is intrinsic to the concept of democracy, which respects people’s preferences and not only their principles. Furthermore, because our understandings of the responsibilities of owners and the limits of what we perceive to be their legitimate interests are influenced by our legal conception of ownership, an extreme libertarian private law regime might undermine social solidarity and dilute people’s responsiveness to claims from distributive justice. Finally, treating the property-less as passive recipients of welfare and mere beneficiaries of the public duty to support the poor entrenches their dependent, subservient status rather than their dignity and independence. Shifting dependence from the context of private law to that of the individual’s relationship with the state via the welfare bureaucracy does not solve the problem and, indeed, might actually exacerbate it.74 This failure to provide context-independent secure starting points for the bipolarity constraint of private law does not mean that such starting points are unavailable. Quite the contrary: because our social values inform our ideals regarding the relationship between the plaintiff and defendant categories (as, for example, spouses, neighbours, co-owners, members of the same community, transactors or competitors), they legitimately and properly inform the initial entitlements of private law, from which correlativity is measured. Social values that are credibly relevant to these normative inquiries – ‘internal’ social values – define the ex ante entitlements of the litigating parties and hence their legitimate expectations. They serve as the foundation of the parties’ bilateral relationships. Such values are different from other, ‘external’ values or public policies whose guidance is more problematic to private law since they impose goals on the parties alien to their bipolar relationship. Weinrib, of course, rejects the notion that correlativity is founded upon social values, insisting that the reasons for the parties’ entitlements – and not only the entitlements themselves – should be internal to the parties’ relationship. But this additional requirement of relational reasons is excessively demanding and unwarranted. The bipolar form of private law is only one object of the justificatory burden prompted by each application of state coercion. Therefore, even if the reasons for the parties’ entitlements are not correlative, private law may justifiably sanction the plaintiff’s complaint if the implications with respect to the parties’ entitlements are sufficiently convergent.75 Weinrib’s overstatement of the significance of relational considerations is also the reason for the second major problem of his account of law’s disciplinary solitude. Weinrib’s apt emphasis on the special justificatory burden that judges face concerning defendants cannot imply that judges should bear no burden of justification concerning their decisions vis-à-vis society at large, notwithstanding the precedential effect of their rulings. Indeed, the opposite is true: given the forward-looking consequences of any significant legal pronouncement, law’s carriers are necessarily responsible to other parties who may be affected. As Weinrib recently acknowledged, ‘[i]n adjudication, a court combines these two dimensions by projecting its own omnilateral authority onto the parties’ bilateral relationship … thereby extend[ing] the significance of its decision beyond the specific dispute, making it a norm for all members of the state’.76 Weinrib, however, considers that the implications of this forward-looking dimension of adjudication are modest and are exhausted by two 74 See e.g. Dagan, Property: Values and Institutions, supra note 25 at 63–66. 75 This paragraph summarizes the claim in Hanoch Dagan, “The Public Dimension of Private Property”, (2013) 24:2 King’s Law Journal 260. Happily enough, as I demonstrate elsewhere, private law reflects these conclusions. See Hanoch Dagan, “Pluralism and Perfectionism in Private Law” (2012) 112 Colum L Rev 1409; Hanoch Dagan, “Autonomy, Pluralism, and Contract Law Theory” (2013) 76 Law & Contemp Probs 19. As I explain in these papers, reliance on social values as the foundation of the parties’ entitlements is not necessarily problematic from the perspective of personal autonomy, however interpreted. The reason is that, at least insofar as the idea of property as the benchmark for correlativity is concerned, these values participate in the construction of multiple property institutions and provide a rich variety, both between and within contexts. They thereby allow more than one option to people who, for example, want to become homeowners, engage in business or enter into intimate relationships. 76 Ernest J Weinrib, “Private Law and Public Right” (2011) 61 UTLJ 191 at 196–8.

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requirements: ‘publicness’ (namely, ‘exhibiting justifications for liability that are accessible to public reason’) and ‘systematicity’ (that is, ‘acting within its competence as an adjudicative body’ and making ‘[t]he principle of the decision … cohere with the entire ensemble of similarly binding decisions’).77 Given the significance of these forward-looking effects of adjudication, however, limiting the implications of the practice of precedent in this fashion is puzzling. Indeed, it is hard to see why judges should have no substantive duty to justify their decisions to those who will be subject to them, even if they are not participating in the judicial drama at hand. To be sure, legislatures have an important role to play in a democracy in considering these broad ramifications of the law. In certain contexts – as where a legal innovation requires a regulatory structure, depends on specialized knowledge available elsewhere or involves excessive widespread redistribution – judges should generally avoid taking part in this drama. They should likewise be significantly deferential regarding newly enacted legislation. But other than these competence-based and democracy-based qualifications of judicial authority, or parallel ones I may have failed to mention, both legislators and judges should utilize their distinct comparative advantages in order to adjust our private law, and law more generally, to new circumstances, challenges and opportunities.78 Furthermore, even where judicial activity should be precluded, legal practice does not, or at least should not, cease to be a culture of justification.79 So even where or if this broader justificatory burden (that necessarily involves considerations Weinrib wants to exclude from legal discourse) is irrelevant to adjudication, it is nonetheless significant to numerous other arenas of legal practice that are also ‘replete with lawmaking, law applying, law interpreting, and law developing functions’80 and thus must be part of the subject matter of law as an academic discipline.81 Weinrib may respond by reminding us that he acknowledges the validity of these instrumental perspectives ‘for the understanding of the transactions governed by the law’ as long as they operate within their ‘own disciplinary boundaries’ and do not attempt to infringe upon the legal perspective.82 He further argues that preserving the distinctiveness of law’s perspective vis-à-vis these ‘non-legal modes of enquiry’ may be a prerequisite for a viable interdisciplinary study of law because only if ‘law has an independent voice’ can it ‘contribute to the conversation among the university’s disciplines’.83 After all, ‘[t]he object of this conversation is not to have one voice suppress any of the others but to maintain the individuality of each.84 When every voice contributes the insight that derives from its own distinctive activity, the conversation can enlarge the understanding of its participants’.85 This response is both correct and important insofar as it warns against the domination of academic legal discourse by the toolkit of another discipline (such as economics) or against the effacement of law’s distinctive features, which may occur if legal theory is understood as the aggregation (or even the synthesis) of insights on law gained by using theories and methods of other disciplines. But Weinrib’s claim goes much further than that, by insisting that, notwithstanding their relevance to ‘the transactions governed by the law’, these insights should be excluded from the core of law both as a practice and as an academic discipline.86 Such exclusion, however, must be unacceptable, and the reason for this is founded on nothing less than one of law’s most distinctive constitutive features: the fact that its normative prescriptions recruit the state’s monopolized power to back up their enforcement. Indeed, because legal prescriptions have such far-reaching effects on people at large rather than only on the litigating parties, legal reasoning – the bread and butter of law both as a

77 Ibid. 78 See Hanoch Dagan, “Judges and Property” in Shyam Balganesh, ed, Intellectual Property and the Common Law (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2013) 17. 79 C.f. Weinrib, “Can Law Survive?”, supra note 4 at 427. 80 Roy Kreitner, “Biographing Legal Realism” (2010) 35 Law & Soc Inq 765 at 780. 81 See Edward L Rubin, “Law and and the Methodology of Law” [1997] Wis L Rev 521 at 551. 82 Weinrib, “Can Law Survive?”, supra note 4 at 430–31, 436. 83 Ibid. 84 Ibid. 85 Ibid. 86 Ibid.

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practice and as an academic discipline – should not blind itself to these broader social ramifications,87 even if, in appropriate cases, it may end up realizing that it cannot or should not address them. If any discipline should be willing to incorporate insights from its neighbours, if synthesis is to be an acceptable, indeed important, part of the self-understanding and the disciplinary core of any academic field, it is law.

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II. Legal Theory and Legal Realism The collapse of pure doctrinalism as a credible academic paradigm seems to invite two diametrically opposed strategies: assimilating law into ‘stronger’ disciplines and turning inward in an attempt to strengthen the porous boundaries between law and its neighbouring disciplines. I have claimed that both these strategies are unsatisfactory. Law’s assimilation into the social sciences and the humanities generated an influx of new insights on law and rejuvenated its academic exploration. But the assimilationist strategy tends to fragment the interdisciplinary lessons of law,88 and ultimately poses a real threat to the identity of law as an academic discipline. By contrast, excluding the expert knowledge of these disciplines from the core toolkit of academic lawyers may strengthen the cohesion of legal academia. Paradoxically, however, the solitude strategy relies on an unacceptable conception of law, and may end up rendering legal academia esoteric, irrelevant and obsolete.89 There is, however, a third way that obviates the pitfalls of these threatening scenarios. This suggested middle position seems implicit in the thriving industry of distinctly legal theories of, for example, property, regulation, international relations and human rights, and may also explain the resilience of law to colonization by the purportedly stronger disciplines from which academic lawyers commonly borrow.90 As Roy Kreitner and I argue elsewhere, there are two interconnected aspects of legal theory’s distinct character, which is the core identifier of law as an academic discipline: the attention it gives to law as a set of coercive normative institutions and its relentless effort to incorporate and synthesize the lessons of other discourses about law.91 The burden of the remaining pages of this chapter is to articulate the skeleton of this conception of legal theory, to explain its added value and to show that it can be both stable and reliable. Some critics of the assimilation of law may find my argument surprising. Weinrib and other critics of assimilation tend to associate its blunt instrumentalism, which not only invites theories from other disciplines but leaves no space for an indigenous legal theory, with legal realism.92 By contrast, I will argue that the most promising starting point for a viable understanding of legal theory is the realist conception of law. The fault lies with the purported heirs of the legal realists who, rather than carrying the realist legacy forward, have torn it apart, robbing it of its most promising lessons.

87 See Max Radin, “My Philosophy of Law” in My Philosophy of Law: Credos of Sixteen American Scholars (Boston: Boston Law Book Co, 1941; reprint: Littleton, Colo: FB Rothman, 1987) 285 at 299. C.f. Joseph Raz, “Formalism and the Rule of Law” in Robert P George, ed, Natural Law Theory: Contemporary Essays (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992) 309 (‘[s]ince there are things, and institutions, which are both intrinsically and instrumentally desirable, we will not understand them unless we realize their dual nature’ at 314). 88 C.f. Paul J Stancil, “The Legal Academy as Dinner Party: A (Short) Manifesto on the Necessity of InterInterdisciplinary Legal Scholarship” [2011] U Ill L Rev 1577. 89 C.f. Armin Krishnan, “What Are Academic Disciplines? Some Observations on the Disciplinarity vs. Interdisciplinarity Debate”, Economic and Social Research Council, National Centre for Research Methods (NCRM) Working Paper Series (March 2009), online: NCRM at 48–50. 90 C.f. JM Balkin, “Interdisciplinarity as Colonization” (1996) 53 Wash & Lee L Rev 949 at 965. 91 See Hanoch Dagan & Roy Kreitner, “The Character of Legal Theory” (2011) 96 Cornell L Rev 671. For a similar conception of legal theory, growing out of important concerns as to the limits of analytical jurisprudence, see Gerald J Postema, Jurisprudence, the Sociable Science: An Essay in Retrieval [unpublished manuscript, on file with author]. 92 See Ernest J Weinrib, “Restoring Restitution”, Book Review of The Law and Ethics by Hanoch Dagan, (2005) 91 Va L Rev 861 at 876. See also John CP Goldberg, “Introduction: Pragmatism and Private Law” (2012) 125 Harv L Rev 1640.

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A. Legal Realism So I begin this part with what I perceive to be the realist conception of law, as I have tried to articulate in my book, Reconstructing American Legal Realism & Rethinking Private Law Theory.93 The starting point of the realist account of law is its critique of classical legal formalism, summarized above,94 which evokes two major concerns.95 First, what can explain past judicial behaviour and predict its future course? Second, and even more significantly, how can law constrain judgments made by unelected judges? How, in other words, can the distinction between law and politics be maintained despite the collapse of law’s autonomy? The legitimacy prong of the realist challenge is particularly formidable because, as legal realists show, it is bolstered by the insidious tendency of pure doctrinalism to obscure contestable value judgments made by judges and entrench the claim of lawyers to an impenetrable professionalism.96 Legal realists answer this challenge by insisting on a view of law as a going institution (or, more precisely, institutions) distinguished by the difficult accommodation of three constitutive yet irresolvable tensions:97 between power and reason, science and craft, and tradition and progress. They thus (implicitly) reject the attempts, typical to many post-realist legal scholars (including the various stripes of assimilationists), to dissolve these tensions or to focus only on one of these features of law, thereby obscuring the most distinctive and irreducible characteristic of the legal phenomenon. *** Thus, the realist conception of law finds room for both power and reason, although it appreciates the difficulties of their coexistence. The realists’ preoccupation with coercion is justified not only by the obvious fact that, unlike other judgments, those prescribed by law’s carriers can recruit the state’s monopolized power to back up their enforcement. It is also premised on the institutional and discursive means that tend to downplay some dimensions of law’s power. These built-in features of law – notably the institutional division of labour between ‘interpretation specialists’ and the actual executors of their judgments, together with our tendency to reify legal constructs and accord them an aura of obviousness and acceptability – render the danger of obscuring law’s coerciveness particularly troubling.98 They explain the realists’ wariness of the trap entailed by the romanticization of law. But realists also reject as equally reductive the mirror image of law, which portrays it as sheer power (or interest, or politics). They insist that law is also a forum of reason, and that reason imposes real – albeit elusive – constraints on the choices of legal decision-makers, and thus on the subsequent implementation of state power. Law is never only about interest or power politics; it is also an exercise in reason giving. Furthermore, because so much is at stake when reasoning about law, legal reasoning becomes particularly urgent and rich, attentive, careful and serious. Reasons can justify law’s coercion only if properly grounded in human values. Realists are thus impatient with attempts to equate normative reasoning with parochial 93 Dagan, Reconstructing, supra note 16. The following paragraphs heavily rely on chapter 2 of that book. The chapter uses texts by legal realists in order to demonstrate how major claims attributed to legal realism fit into a particular understanding of law. My claim, however, is not the discovery of legal realism’s true essence. My reading of legal realist literature is unashamedly influenced by my own convictions about law, though I do not pretend to have invented the ideas I present. 94 See text accompanying notes 16–29, supra. 95 See Anthony T Kronman, “Jurisprudential Responses to Legal Realism” (1988) 73 Cornell L Rev 335 at 335–6. 96 See Rodell, supra note 20 at 3–4, 6–7, 153, 157–8, 186, 189, 196, 198. 97 I deliberately use the softer term ‘tension’ rather than stronger ones such as ‘contradiction’. The relationships I discuss are not contradictory. But although the terms in these pairs are not antithetical, they do refer to alternative allegiances, to competing states of mind and perspectives. The difficulty of accommodating them is thus similar to that of reconciling incommensurable goods or obligations. 98 See Cohen, “Transcendental Nonsense”, supra note 24 at 811–12, 820–21, 827–9; Dewey, “Logical Method”, supra note 20 at 191–3; Oliver W Holmes, “Law in Science and Science in Law” in Oliver W Holmes, The Collected Legal Papers (Mineola, NY: Dover, 2007) at 210, 230, 232, 238–9. See also Robert Cover, “Violence and the Word” in Martha Monow, Michael Ryan & Austin Sarat, eds, Narrative, Violence, and the Law: The Essays of Robert Cover (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992) 203.

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interests or arbitrary power. They also find such exercises morally irresponsible because they undermine both the possibility of criticizing state power and the option of marshalling the law for morally required social change.99 And yet, realists are also wary of the idea that reason can displace interest or that law can exclude all force except that of the better argument. Because reasoning about law is reasoning about power and interest, the reasons given by law’s carriers should always be treated with suspicion. This caution accounts for the realists’ endorsement of value pluralism, as well as for their understanding of law’s quest for justification as a perennial process that constantly invites criticism of law’s means, ends and other (particularly distributive) consequences.100 Legal realists do not pretend they have solved the mystery of reason or demonstrated how reason can survive in law’s coercive environment. Their recognition that coerciveness and reason are doomed to coexist in any credible account of the law is nonetheless significant. Making this tension an inherent characteristic of law means that reductionist theories employing an overly romantic or too cynical conception of law must be rejected. This approach also steers us toward a continuous critical awareness of the complex interaction between reason and power. It thereby seeks to accentuate the distinct responsibility incumbent on the reasoning of and about power, minimizing the corrupting potential of the self-interested pursuit of power and the perpetuation of what could end up as merely group preferences and interests. *** I turn now to the type of reasons that realists invite into the legal discourse, introducing law’s second constitutive tension. Realists argue that the forward-looking aspect of legal reasoning relies on both science and craft. Realists recognize the profound differences between, on the one hand, lawyers as social engineers who dispassionately combine empirical knowledge with normative insights, and, on the other, lawyers as practical reasoners who employ contextual judgment as part of a process of dialogic adjudication. They nonetheless insist on preserving the difficulty of accommodating science and craft as yet another tension constitutive of law. Realists insist on the importance of empirical inquiries, such as investigating the hidden regularities of legal doctrine in order to restore law’s predictability, or studying the practical consequences of law in order to better direct the evolution of law and further its legitimacy.101 But my prototype realists reject any pretence that knowledge of these important social facts can be a substitute for political morality. They realize that value judgments are indispensable, not only when evaluating empirical research but also when simply choosing the facts to be investigated. Moreover, they are always careful not to accept existing normative preferences uncritically. Legal realists insist that neither science nor an ethics that ignores the data of science offers a valid test of law’s merits. Legal analysis needs both empirical data and normative judgments.102 Because law affects people’s lives dramatically, these social facts and human values must always inform the direction of legal evolution. But while legal reasoning necessarily shares this feature with other forms of practical reasoning, the realist conception of law also highlights that legal reasoning is, to some extent,  99 See KN Llewellyn, “The Normative, the Legal, and the Law-Jobs: The Problem of Juristic Method” (1940) 49 Yale LJ 1355 at 1362–5, 1367–8, 1370, 1381–3, 1387 [Llewellyn, “Normative”]. See also Thomas W Bechtler, “American Legal Realism Revaluated” in Thomas W Bechtler, ed, Law in a Social Context: Liber Amicorum Honouring Professor Lon L Fuller (Deventer, The Netherlands: Kluwer, 1978) 3 at 20–21; Harry W Jones, “Law and Morality in the Perspective of Legal Realism” (1961) 61 Colum L Rev 799 at 801, 809; Hessel E Yntema, “The Rational Basis of Legal Science” (1931) 31 Colum L Rev 255 at 295. 100 See Holmes, “Path of the Law”, supra note 30 at 181; Karl N Llewellyn, “On the Good, the True, the Beautiful, in Law” in Jurisprudence: Realism in Theory and in Practice (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962) 167 at 167, 211–2; Hessel E Yntema, “Jurisprudence on Parade” (1941) 39 Mich L Rev 1154 at 1169. 101 See respectively, for example, Joseph W Bingham, “What Is the Law?” (1912) 11 Mich L Rev 1 at 17; John Henry Schlegel, American Legal Realism and Empirical Legal Science (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1995) at ch 2, 4. 102 See Cohen, “Modern Ethics”, supra note 34 at 45; Cohen, “Transcendental Nonsense”, supra note 24 at 75–76; William Twining, “The Idea of Juristic Method: A Tribute to Karl Llewellyn” (1993) 48 U Miami L Rev 119 at 151–2.

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a distinct mode of argumentation and analysis. Hence, realists pay attention to the distinctive institutional characteristics of law and study their potential virtues while still aware of their possible abuse. The procedural characteristics of the adversary process, as well as the professional norms that bind judicial opinions – notably the requirement of a universalizable justification – provide a unique social setting for adjudication. The procedural characteristics establish the accountability of law’s carriers to law’s subjects and encourage judges to develop what Cohen terms ‘a many-perspectived view of the world’ or a ‘synoptic vision’ that ‘can relieve us of the endless anarchy of one-eyed vision’.103 Moreover, because the judicial drama is always situated in a specific human context, lawyers have constant and unmediated access to human situations and to actual problems of contemporary life. This contextuality of legal judgments facilitates lawyers’ unique skill in capturing the subtleties of various types of cases and in adjusting the legal treatment to the distinct characteristics of each category.104 *** The extended realist treatment of science and craft derives from the conviction that law is profoundly dynamic, hence my third constitutive tension. Law’s inherent dynamism implies that the legal positivist attempt to understand law statically by sheer reference to verifiable facts – such as the authoritative commands of a political superior or the rules identified by a rule of recognition – is hopeless.105 In the realist conception, law is ‘a going institution’ or, in John Dewey’s words, ‘a social process, not something that can be done or happen at a certain date’.106 As a going institution, law is structured to be an ‘endless process of testing and retesting’.107 Thus understood, law is a great human laboratory continuously seeking improvement.108 This quest ‘for justice and adjustment’ in the legal discourse is invariably constrained by legal tradition. Law’s past serves as the starting point for contemporary analysis, not only because it is an anchor of intelligibility and predictability. Legal realists begin with the existing doctrinal landscape because it may (and often does) incorporate valuable – although implicit and sometimes imperfectly executed – normative choices. In other words, since the adjudicatory process so uniquely combines scientific and normative insights within a legal professionalism premised on institutional constraints and practical wisdom, its past yield of accumulated judicial experience and judgment deserves respect. Although legal realists do not accord every existing rule overwhelming normative authority, they do obey Llewellyn’s ‘law of fitness and flavor’, whereby the instant outcome and rule think ‘with the feel’ of the case law system as a whole, and ‘go with the grain rather than across or against it’. Realists celebrate common law’s Grand Style, described by Llewellyn as ‘a functioning harmonization of vision with tradition, of continuity with growth, of machinery with purpose, of measure with need’, mediating between ‘the seeming commands of the authorities and the felt demands of justice’.109

103 Felix S Cohen, “Field Theory and Judicial Logic” in Lucy Kramer Cohen, ed, The Legal Conscience: Selected Papers of Felix S Cohen (Newhaven, Conn: Yale University Press, 1960) at 121, 125–6. 104 Herman Oliphant, “A Return to Stare Decisis” (1928) 14 ABA J 71 at 73–4, 159. See also Karl N Llewellyn, “A Realistic Jurisprudence: The Next Step” in Jurisprudence: Realism in Theory and in Practice (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962) at 3, 27–8, 32; Walter W Cook, “Scientific Method and the Law” in William W Fisher III, Morton J Horwitz & Thomas A Reed, eds, American Legal Realism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993) 242 at 242, 246. 105 See respectively John Austin, The Province of Jurisprudence Determined, edited by HLA Hart (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1954) 14; Hart, supra note 17 at 107. See also Joseph Raz, The Authority of Law (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979) at 40. 106 John Dewey, “My Philosophy of Law” in My Philosophy of Law: Credos of Sixteen American Scholars (Boston: Boston Law Book Co, 1941; reprint: Littleton, Colo: FB Rothman, 1987) 71 at 73, 77 [Dewey, “My Philosophy”]. See also KN Llewellyn, “My Philosophy of Law” in My Philosophy of Law: Credos of Sixteen American Scholars (Boston: Boston Law Book Co, 1941; reprint: Littleton, Colo: FB Rothman, 1987) 181 at 183, 183–4; Radin, supra note 87 at 295. 107 Dewey, “My Philosophy”, supra note 106. 108 Ibid. 109 Karl N Llewellyn, The Common Law Tradition: Deciding Appeals (New York: WS Hein, 1960) at 36, 38, 190–1, 217, 222–3; Llewellyn, Case Law, supra note 21 at 25, 77; Karl N Llewellyn, “Law and the Social Sciences” in Jurisprudence: Realism in Theory and in Practice (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962) at 357, 361–2; Llewellyn, “Normative”, supra note 99 at 1385.

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B. Legal Theory Contemporary accounts of law’s violence, or of its role as a forum of reason, may be richer than the realist accounts of power and reason in law. By the same token, the use of science in legal discourse is today more sophisticated than at the pinnacle of legal realism, and some aspects of the craft of lawyering are better understood now than they were by Llewellyn et al. Finally, contemporary accounts of legal evolution can enrich the sketchy realist thesis about the constitutive dynamism of law. But the (lost?) lesson of the legal realist legacy is that this process of specialization and fragmentation of legal scholarship involves a real intellectual loss because any one-dimensional account of law is hopelessly deficient. Therefore, the starting point for deciphering the distinctive character of legal theory, which lies at the core of law as an academic discipline, is to regain the realist appreciation of law’s most distinctive feature: its difficult, but inevitable, accommodation of power and reason, science and craft, and tradition and progress. To clarify: I am not claiming that legal realism exhausts legal theory. Rather, legal theory is a genus and legal realism is one species of that genus. Legal theorists can obviously argue about which legal theories are good or valuable, and even about the very terms of reference of such a debate. Thus, while realism’s constant balancing of reason and power recommends it as a legal theory, other legal theories could have a completely different take on the relationship between reason and power.110 But the key move in appreciating the significance of the species, and thus of the added value of law as an academic discipline, lies in the two interconnected aspects of the distinct character of legal theory. Both these aspects – the attention that legal theory gives to law as a set of coercive normative institutions and its relentless effort to incorporate and synthesize the lessons of the other discourses about law – spring naturally from the legacy of legal realism.111 The first feature – interrogating the law as a set of coercive normative institutions – is a condensed restatement of the various aspects of the realist conception of law. It emphasizes the inherent tension between power and reason. It likewise highlights the fact that, in law, this tension is always situated institutionally.112 This institutional perspective implies that legal theory expands its view to the whole range of institutions through which law is created, applied or otherwise becomes effective. This institutional focus also requires attention to law’s dynamism, namely, to the tension between tradition and progress as well as to both sciencebased and craft-based engines of legal evolution. In this way, insights from other disciplines of the social sciences and the humanities are always potentially relevant to legal theory. And yet, alongside these ‘external’ data, legal theory pays careful attention to law’s structural and procedural features as well as to the character traits conducive to lawyers’ expertise in practical reasoning.113 Indeed, in order to perform its tasks of shedding light – either explanatory, justificatory or reformist – on society’s coercive normative institutions, legal theory often resorts to insights from other discourses about law, drawing on the various applications of theories and methodologies from other disciplines. As noted, however, the synthetic spirit of legal theory is not just a matter of methodological inclination; rather, the appreciation of the nature of law as a set of coercive normative institutions justifies it or even mandates it. Synthesis is indeed the second distinctive feature of legal theory. 110 Kantian legal theories, for example, take the possibility of coercion as a mandate for reason to be the sole motivator in law (i.e., for there to be law, all coercive power must be subjugated to reason); see Arthur Ripstein, Force and Freedom: Kant’s Legal and Political Philosophy (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2009) at 4–29. By contrast, some Marxist theories maintain that, while law exhibits an internally consistent and reasoned framework, the entire mode of reason flows from and is dependent on (economic) power, so that law’s reason serves power; see Evgeny B Pashukanis, Law and Marxism: A General Theory, ed by Chris Arthur, translated by Barbara Einhorn (London: Ink Links, 1978) at 63–4. Analytical jurisprudence is also similarly divided, with some (such as John Austin) emphasizing law’s coercive dimension and others (such as HLA Hart) highlighting its normativity. Compare Austin, supra note 105 at 9–33 with Hart, supra note 17 at 55–9. 111 See Dagan & Kreitner, supra note 91, on which this section draws. 112 For a survey of recent institutionalist work, see Victoria Nourse & Gregory Shaffer, “Varieties of New Legal Realism: Can a New World Order Prompt a New Legal Theory?” (2009) 95 Cornell L Rev 61 at 85–90. 113 To be sure, realists tend to present just one particular (and particularly optimistic) view of thinking like a lawyer. Legal theory’s attention to law as rhetoric or discourse may reach conclusions quite opposed to the view of lawyers as enjoying illumination or unmediated access to human situations. See e.g. Elizabeth Mertz, The Language of Law School: Learning to “Think Like a Lawyer” (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007) at 4–11, 207–23.

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Legal theory often resorts to socio-historical analyses of the law as well as to comparative law (a traditional tool of academic lawyers) because they can offer contextual accounts that help to explain the sources and the evolution of the legal terrain.114 Socio-historical analyses and comparative law also helpfully open up the legal imagination by undermining the status quo’s (implicit) claim of necessity and revealing the contingency of the present. At times, they can help unearth competing legal possibilities and provide hints as to the possible ramifications of their adoption. Policy-oriented scholarship, in turn, is obviously helpful in figuring out the real life ramifications of current law. This task, which is important both to understand the law and to evaluate it, often relies on social scientific methods (from economics, psychology, sociology, anthropology and political science), both empirical and theoretical. Insofar as this stage of research is aimed at assessing the normative desirability of law, it typically leads to a second stage that looks at law’s goals and thus resorts to guidance from neighbouring evaluative disciplines, notably ethics and political philosophy. And where legal theorists aim at reconstruction, designing alternatives and comparing their expected performances, they again typically use both social scientific and normative tools.115 All these external insights are essential to legal theory, hence its deep commitment to interdisciplinarity. But a thorough understanding of the evolution and dynamics of law always requires a robust acquaintance with law’s institutional, structural and discursive characteristics as well. This may explain why, more so than their counterparts in the social sciences and the humanities who write about law, legal theorists often explicitly or implicitly synthesize into their accounts the typical and recurrent advantages and limitations of law (vis-à-vis other social institutions), as well as the subtle differences between various legal fields and legal institutions.116 It may also explain the tendency of legal theory to be less abstract than the philosophical, economic or other theories with which it interacts.117 Finally, it points to the enduring role of doctrinalism – the (internal) language of legal professionals – as an object of our study as well as to the significance of Weinrib’s insistence on correlativity as a constitutive feature of private law, even though the isolationist conclusions he draws from this insight must be rejected. Legal theorists who recognize the possibilities of synthesizing these languages of legal scholarship are not overly concerned with the dismissal of legal tradition as unscientific, nor by the fear of intellectual coopting by legal practice.118 They are also undeterred by the worry that the synthesis prescription calls for only a superficial command of the synthesized theories and methodologies. While superficiality should always be a concern, there is no reason to believe that it is necessarily more acute where the division of our knowledge about human affairs changes. Their range of starting points for analysis is immense. For example, some legal theorists will begin with existing doctrines or proposals for legal reform, convinced that starting with the actual arrangements governing some aspect of life properly recognizes law’s social basis and is also the most fruitful mode of critical engagement.119 Others will begin with a general analytical problem and may not discuss particular doctrines in much detail at all. Others still might begin with an abstract question but extensively use doctrine to illustrate or test their claims. Legal theory comes in many flavours, from the apologetic to the radical and, of course, at varying levels of quality. One can hope that theorists will examine legal doctrines or institutions with both a critical eye and a reconstructive spirit. And one can similarly hope

114 See e.g., in the present volume, Rosalie Jukier, “The Impact of ‘Stateless Law’ on Legal Pedagogy”, ch 16. 115 This distinction is rough and solely methodical; it does not mean to imply that social science can actually be value-free or devoid of normative underpinnings. 116 C.f. Penner, supra note 27 at 328 (while law should be compatible with morality, it is irreducible to morality). 117 C.f. ibid. at 335–7, 340–42 (arguing that because overly abstract theories do not take seriously important legal distinctions, legal theory can either ‘explore the philosophically interesting or puzzling questions the law raises’ with no interest in any aspect of legal doctrine or purport only to provide rich description of such particular areas of law). 118 Quite the contrary: the ‘methodological pluralism’ that typifies ‘current legal scholarship’ evinces ‘a mature openness to other disciplines that demonstrates a welcome self-confidence’: Christopher McCrudden, “Legal Research and the Social Sciences” (2006) 122 Law Q Rev 632 at 645. 119 C.f. Michael Walzer, Interpretation and Social Criticism (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1987) at 22, 30, 41, 43, 46–8, 61.

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that legal theorists will not shy away from reaching a conclusion that nothing short of radical transformation may be required for law to be acceptable.120 Thus conceived, legal theory combines lessons from interfacing disciplines in the social sciences and the humanities, but is irreducible to any of them. By the same token, although legal theory acknowledges the significance of internal insights, it does not aspire to closure and, rather than seeking to establish law as an autonomous academic discipline à la Weinrib, it celebrates its embeddedness in the social sciences and the humanities.121 Finally, although the synthetic enterprise of legal theory sounds (and indeed is) academically ambitious,122 it is or at least can be highly relevant to the practice of judges and practising lawyers, at least insofar as they are interested in explaining, justifying or reforming the law. In this sense, legal theory may help to reduce the gap between legal academia and the legal profession.123 It also sets up an attractive vision of legal education. As Llewellyn insisted, studying law as a liberal art by combining ‘[t]echnique, the intellectual side, the spiritual – the true, the beautiful, the good’ – is the best practical training since it accords students ‘vision, range, depth, balance, and rich humanity’, which are key for effective and good practical work.124 Such selfconfidence in legal theory’s synthetic spirit springs from the legal realist conviction that only an engagement with the complexity of law can generate useful accounts of legal phenomena. This conviction leads legal theorists to a principled anti-purist position. In turn, this position is strengthened even further for evaluative (justificatory or reformist) legal theorists, because the responsibility of potentially affecting people’s lives forces upon them a duty to doubt as well as a duty to decide, obligations one cannot discharge by endorsing any single perspective on law.125 Yet, alongside its self-confidence, an almost constitutive discomfort typifies legal theory. This discomfort may explain why, typically, legal theory does not simply accept other discourses about law in patient resignation but, in fact, doggedly seeks out interaction with them. This disposition derives from the fact that, in most dimensions of law, legal theory is positioned somewhere midway between the other discourses about law, and it is thus always exposed (albeit to a moderate degree) to the professional hazards of their practitioners. Thus, on the one hand, legal theory typically puts less emphasis on law’s coerciveness and the risks of its collapse to brute politics than do socio-historical analyses. Therefore, at least to some degree, it risks a lack of critical reflectivity that haunts both purely internal analyses of law and, to a lesser degree, policy-oriented ones that rarely pay attention to these dimensions. On the other hand, by drawing away (more than internal analyses of law) from legal doctrine and from the jurists’ point of view, legal theory may be insufficiently attuned to law’s distinctiveness vis-à-vis other social, economic and cultural institutions. Similarly, although legal theory is more responsive than both socio-historical analyses and internal analyses of law to the normative dimension 120 Indeed, legal theory is not limited to the happy middle; genuine insight often comes from what some perceive as extremes. Although such insights might require domestication for implementation through law, they can and should arise and develop in legal theory. C.f. Robin West, Normative Jurisprudence: An Introduction (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2011). 121 See also Hanoch Dagan, “Defending Legal Realism: A Response to Four Critics” (2014) 1 Critical Analysis of Law 254 at 261–3. In itself, this position may be controversial: legal theory can be conceived as a sub-system with the kind of autonomy described by autopoiesis. A detailed argument with systems theorists is beyond the scope of this chapter, but it is important to note that the conflict is actually minimal. Systems theorists believe that systems are cognitively open but operatively closed. For my purposes, it suffices to note that since legal theory (as imagined here) does not actually have an operative mode, its cognitive openness is all that is at stake in the current formulation of embeddedness. See Niklas Luhman, Law as a Social System, edited by Fatima Kastner et al, translated by Klaud A Ziegert (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004) at 76–141. 122 Indeed, if synthesis is crucial to legal theory, as I claim, it needs to become a focal point of our reflective methodological attention. 123 See Harry T Edwards, “The Growing Disjunction between Legal Education and the Legal Profession” (1992) 91 Mich L Rev 34 at 41–2. For a convincing platform of cooperation between legal academia and the bar, see Robert W Gordon, “Lawyers, Scholars, and the ‘Middle Ground’” (1993) 91 Mich L Rev 2075 at 2098. 124 Karl N Llewellyn, “The Study of Law as a Liberal Art” in Jurisprudence: Realism in Theory and in Practice (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962) at 375, 376, 394. See also Kathleen M Sullivan, “Foreword: Interdisciplinarity” (2002) 100 Mich L Rev 1217. 125 See Alan Schwartz, “Two Culture Problems in Law and Economics” (2011) 2011 U Ill L Rev 1531 at 1532; Joseph William Singer, “Normative Methods for Lawyers” (2009) 56 UCLA L Rev 899 at 910–11; Eyal Zamir, “Towards an Integrative Legal Scholarship” (2008) 4 Haifa Law Review 131 at 142–3.

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of law and its potential role as an instrument for social change, it is typically less reform-minded than policybased analyses. It may thus be subject to the risks of either romantic conservatism or ivory-tower playfulness. The core convictions underlying legal theory require legal theorists to navigate these unstable middle positions. They imply that legal theory will generally rely on pragmatic judgments as to the optimal degree of suspension from the practice of law and the optimal mix of socio-historical and normative perspectives that should be included in its analysis. Though the imprecision of such judgments does not justify their disparagement, complacency about them does not seem appropriate either. Not only do other discourses supply legal theory with essential inputs, they also serve as potential sources for criticizing excesses or shortcomings in striking this delicate and sensitive balance. The critiques are obviously different from one another and at times may indeed be diametrically opposed. Legal theorists, whose accounts often serve to bridge these contradictory positions, can rely on the critical attitudes of other members of the legal discourses family as checks on what may be the most challenging task of a solid legal theory: properly accommodating the insights of all these schools into workable theoretical frameworks that rely on a robust understanding of law as a set of coercive normative institutions.126 III. Concluding Remarks Law is a serious academic discipline and legal academics study a set of increasingly important social institutions. Analysis of these institutions requires careful attention to their significant features and notably to the difficult accommodation of power and reason, science and craft, and tradition and progress. This core distinctive characteristic of law as a set of coercive normative institutions also explains the typical emphasis of legal theory on synthesis, namely, its characteristic recourse to insight on law or its various branches and doctrines from other disciplines in an attempt to incorporate them into its corpus. As an academic discipline, then, law should reject both assimilation and isolation. The institutional implications of this conclusion are modest, but important. This understanding of law as an academic discipline values both internal analyses of law, which resist synthesis, and external analyses of law, which use theories and methods from other disciplines. It insists, however, that practitioners from these schools should be able to speak legal theory (as defined here), if not with native proficiency then at least as a second language. Requesting participants in a social practice to command a language that is deemed to be the core of that practice raises the risk of creating a hegemonic discourse that might marginalize unorthodox languages. But given the secure positions of both the inner language of law and of languages that rely on other disciplines, applying this request to legal theory does not entail such a risk. Quite the contrary, rather than silencing disputes, broad recognition of the importance of legal theory as a common language is likely to trigger a fruitful and probably vigorous debate as to its precise characteristics. Thus, while the development of high-powered other-discipline(s)-based academic associations and peer-review journals is important, it is likewise imperative to develop parallel institutional venues that can similarly nurture legal theory, both in general and respecting the various branches of the law. Indeed, like other academic disciplines, legal theory (or the theory of a particular legal branch) allows the initiated to engage in a deeper inquiry, but becoming adept at it requires focus and training. This means that while law faculties definitely have room for philosophers, economists, historians and practitioners from other neighbouring disciplines, legal academia should not rely on these disciplines too heavily in the training of its own scholars. Legal academics should have a background in legal theory and study it as a field, and doctoral or other research-based advanced degree programmes in law in which legal theory takes centre stage should be supported and developed for this purpose.127

126 In other words, there are good reasons why, from the point of view of legal theory, it is essential to have all these perspectives on law in place, even if not necessarily in one institution. 127 For one example, which I have spent considerable energy supporting, see “The Zvi Meitar Center for Advanced Legal Studies”, online: Tel Aviv University Buchmann Faculty of Law .

Chapter 6

Doctrinal Knowledge, Legal Doctrinal Scholarship and the Problem of Interdisciplinary Engagement

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Mátyás Bódig

I. Introduction Over the last few decades, we have seen ‘legal nationalism’ coming under increasing pressure in legal scholarship. It is becoming ever harder to maintain the imagery of national legal systems as self-contained bodies of law that fully control the impact of external normative sources through their own internal mechanisms. In its heyday, legal nationalism meant that the influence of other legal systems (including international law) was carefully channelled through internal authority structures. For most legal scholars, that model can no longer work. It is not that one can no longer use the posited law of the nation-state as the framework of orientation. But scholars have to accept that that law is profoundly shaped by the influence of legal authorities located outside the framework of domestic institutions (e.g., the WTO or the UN Human Rights Committee), and sometimes even the semi-autonomous authority structures of sub-national groups (like indigenous communities). This generates clashes of authorities that cannot be sorted out merely by adjusting and reinforcing the hierarchy of domestic institutions.1 It is an exciting question how these transformations affect the theory and practice of legal scholarship2 – an interpretive discipline hard-wired to defer to authorities. The challenge of mediating between a variety of different normative sources calls for adjustments in the doctrinal framework scholars work with,3 and legal scholarship needs to broaden its knowledge base to be able to deal with the complexity of the social and institutional forces shaping the law. In this chapter, I address an aspect of the problem of finding suitable methodological models for legal scholarship: how to get the knowledge base for legal scholarship right? And I will explore that issue in respect of the challenge of interdisciplinary engagement in legal scholarship. Perhaps somewhat counter-intuitively, I do not argue that contemporary challenges call for a reorientation of legal scholarship. In a sense, the shifting patterns of legal scholarship actually make its epistemological profile clearer, its epistemological core more visible.4 Within the narrow confines of this chapter, I set out to develop three points to bolster this claim. First, I provide a relatively brief and very abstract characterization of doctrinal knowledge and doctrinal scholarship – in order to capture the epistemological paradigm underlying legal doctrinal scholarship. It may help us get a better idea of how doctrinal reflection can move between different social practices. (Among others, it explains how legal scholarship can become ‘stateless’ without losing its character.) Second, I outline the challenges that made it sometimes difficult to preserve the academic credibility of a doctrinally oriented legal scholarship, and what prompted many legal scholars to react to the methodological uncertainties surrounding it by giving in to the lure of ‘instrumentalizing’ the law. Thirdly, I seek to clarify how the character of legal doctrinal scholarship necessitates interdisciplinary engagement. That 1 This plays out differently in different countries. In the United Kingdom, the challenge is felt primarily through the influence of European law and the jurisprudence of the European Court of Human Rights (especially since the Human Rights Act 1998 (UK), c 42, came into force). 2 In this chapter, I use the term ‘legal scholarship’ to refer to doctrinally oriented legal scholarship. 3 One can think of the decades-long struggle of constitutional scholars in Britain over reconciling parliamentary sovereignty with the authority of European institutions. For a brief overview, see NW Barber, “The Afterlife of Parliamentary Sovereignty” (2011) 9 International Journal of Constitutional Law 144. 4 Actually, this is partly because we have seen similar patterns in legal scholarship in the past. Medieval jurists were used to being situated at the crossroads of rival authority structures (i.e., secular and ecclesiastical), and developing legal positions by mediating between them.

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brings into focus important issues on how interdisciplinary work can be reconciled with the normative and internalist character of legal scholarship. Hopefully, addressing that issue will lend a bit more credibility to my non-instrumentalist vision for legal scholarship. I highlight the fact that this analysis is an integral part of the theoretical initiative that I first articulated in my ‘Legal Theory and Legal Doctrinal Scholarship’.5

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II. Doctrinal Knowledge, Doctrinal Expertise and Doctrinal Scholarship Much in my analysis crucially depends on the claim that legal doctrinal scholarship represents an epistemological paradigm, making it distinguishable from non-doctrinal disciplines. First, I need to articulate this claim to ground all the further points I make in this chapter. Importantly, I do not believe that the epistemological paradigm only applies to legal scholarship. It has a broader application in social life. This is why it is useful to work from a more abstract characterization of the idea of doctrinal scholarship in this chapter. It is appropriate to present varieties of legal doctrinal scholarship as manifestations of this more abstract construction. My account associates doctrinal scholarship with the function of cultivating doctrinal knowledge.6 In my understanding, doctrinal knowledge grows in and around normative social practices (like the different incarnations of law or religious practices) and is focused on their normative aspects. Mastering doctrinal knowledge presupposes familiarity with the norms of the practice (‘knowing what the rules are’) but this is not what determines its character. Doctrinal knowledge builds competence about the justificatory implications of the normative terms of participating. (In principle, one can recite each norm of the practice, yet still be incompetent in this more specific sense.) Gaining doctrinal knowledge enables one to align one’s actions and practical judgments with the normative content of the practice. It helps figure out how far one can go without falling foul of the normative terms of participation. In other words, it is practical knowledge fitted into the normative parameters for social practices. Importantly, mastering doctrinal knowledge facilitates not improved compliance (and definitely not blind obedience) but the ability to negotiate one’s options in a normatively constructed social environment. In fact, doctrinal knowledge comes into its own when the normative assessment of situations is opened up for contestation within the practice itself – that is, when the complexity of the practice leaves room for significant interpretive disagreement.7 Doctrinal knowledge is particularly important for those who seek to gain competence in navigating fields of contestation within normative practices. A further implication of this inherent connection with contestation is that doctrinal knowledge is premised on a perspective on social practices that makes them appear as dynamic and contingent constructions, continuously shaped by human efforts (by what participants do about them and think of them). Doctrinal knowledge, by generating an awareness of interpretive variability, internal tensions and patterns of contestation, facilitates ‘active agency’8 – creative engagement with the normative content of the practice (within the bounds of fidelity to the practice). These observations can be organized around a few conceptual points. (1) Doctrinal knowledge is practiceoriented: it is born out of engagement with the normative aspects of social practices. (2) It also perceives practices as contingent, man-made and subject to change. It makes social practices look inherently precarious: they would not survive without the commitment and contribution of their participants. (3) Doctrinal knowledge

5 See Mátyás Bódig, “Legal Theory and Legal Doctrinal Scholarship” (2010) 23 Can JL & Jur 483 [Bódig, “Legal Theory”]. 6 As I work from a more abstract epistemological paradigm, I could not rely on a ‘legal doctrine’ or the ‘legal doctrine’ as my basic conceptual building block. 7 There is a further condition that I do not go into here. Contestation can only shape the practice if normative disagreements are not suppressed by unfavourable power relations. 8 Many have realized that the law operates by using, as opposed to suppressing, the agency of humans. See e.g. Jeremy Waldron, “The Concept and the Rule of Law” (2008) 43 Ga L Rev 1 at 26. I tie this feature to the doctrinal character of law.

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is also practice-specific and interpretive: it takes a ‘strong internalist’ point of view9 on actual, historically contingent practices, and is limited to those practices in its truth claims. (4) Doctrinal knowledge is also normative, and not simply because it is about norms and their justificatory implications but mainly because it is tied to a practical orientation: accepting normative guidance from the given practice,10 and being committed to maintaining it in its integrity. (5) Finally, doctrinal knowledge is non-instrumental about the practice it is related to. Due to its special significance for my analysis, we need to say more about this final point – namely that doctrinal knowledge addresses the epistemic needs of those who accept normative guidance from the practice. For them, participation is never simply about how to use the practice to one’s subjective ends. Doctrinal knowledge is generated in the process of not simply learning about the practice but also learning from the practice. Its epistemic merits are conditional on accepting that the practice has a value-content that one can access only through participation,11 and that engages with what a committed participant can regard as appropriate practical objectives and the proper ways of pursuing them. Doctrinal knowledge is noninstrumental in this specific sense. The importance of this point becomes clearer if we contrast doctrinal knowledge with instrumental perspectives on social practices. Crucially, people often (perhaps even typically) have instrumental perspectives on the social practices they come into contact with. Practice-relevant knowledge can be instrumental in at least two fundamental ways. The first is based on refusing to engage with the values internal to the practice. Participation is made fully dependent on external objectives or interests. As a result, the relevance of normative competence about the practice is limited to figuring out the ways in which it promotes or hinders those external objectives (limited to asking ‘what is it in it for me?’).12 The other instrumentalizing perspective is slightly more complex. It is premised on taking the practice as fully transparent in its valuecontent: its normative elements are fully reducible to values that one can understand in abstraction from the practice. One can treat the norms of the practice as mere proxies to external values.13 The practice is taken as lacking the capacity to shape one’s own understanding of values. As I have mentioned, I define doctrinal scholarship as having the function of cultivating doctrinal knowledge. It ties doctrinal knowledge to historically contingent social practices. But it needs some explanation as to how doctrinal scholarship comes about. There is something special about normative social practices that give rise to doctrinal scholarship. I would argue that they are practices institutionalized in a particular way: authorities are instituted to sustain them, and at least some of their norms are (authoritatively) fixed. It is not because authorities somehow directly stimulate the emergence of doctrinal scholarship. The connection is actually based on a particular feature of authoritative institutionalization: it opens up the possibility that an organized group can come to dominate the practice by asserting expertise (epistemic authority14) on its normative content. The practice can come to be dominated by a profession.15 Of course, the profession is not just the cohort of people who happen to busy themselves with the practice (e.g., making a  9 See Bódig, “Legal Theory”, supra note 5 at 494–5. See also Stephen Perry, “Interpretation and Methodology in Legal Theory” in Andrei Marmor, ed, Law and Interpretation: Essays in Legal Philosophy (Oxford: Clarendon, 1995) 98. 10 For my account of normative guidance, see Mátyás Bódig, “The Issue of Normativity and the Methodological Implications of Interpretivism I: The Idea of Normative Guidance” (2013) 54 Acta Juridica Hungarica 119. 11 This claim is inspired by MacIntyre’s account of ‘internal goods’. See Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue, 2d ed (Notre Dame, Ind: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984) at 190–91. 12 This is the kind of instrumentalization that is reflected in the practical orientation of Holmes’s ‘bad man’. See Oliver W Holmes, “The Path of the Law” (1997) 110 Harv L Rev 991 at 993. 13 In terms of law, the primary example for this ‘instrumentalizing’ tendency is ‘Economic Analysis of Law’, or more specifically, the Posner theorem. Legal doctrines can be reduced to a narrow set of principles that are themselves derived from the idea of economic efficiency. And the meaning of economic efficiency can be fully articulated without making reference to legal practices. See Richard Posner, Economic Analysis of Law, 7th ed (New York: Wolters Kluwer, 2007) at 5–38, 584–5. 14 I rely here on the Razian distinction between ‘theoretical’ and ‘practical’ authority. See e.g. Joseph Raz, Ethics in the Public Domain (Oxford: Clarendon, 1994) at 211–12. 15 I am influenced here by a concept of professions that focuses on the specialized knowledge they cultivate and use to gain social influence. See Andrew Abbott, The System of Professions: An Essay on the Division of Expert Labor (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988) at 8, 52–3.

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living out of it) and from whom officials may be recruited. The profession is a group with a common identity capable of representing interests, marginalizing outsiders and securing monopoly over certain practicerelated activities. That implies setting competence requirements for membership in the profession, such as by developing forms of professional education. Professionalization outlines criteria for certified expertise. So, the connection I see between doctrinal scholarship and institutional practices (dominated by a profession) is based on the observation that, when the epistemic authority of the relevant professional group is built on knowledge on the normative content of the practice, the relevant expertise will have to be doctrinal. Ultimately, what stimulates the emergence of doctrinal scholarship is the need for certified doctrinal expertise.16 The straightforward implication is that there is no doctrinal scholarship without a profession that appropriates doctrinal knowledge concerning the relevant practice, and for which mastering doctrinal knowledge is an inherent part of its identity and role constructions. Doctrinal scholarship takes shape in the process of bringing under academic control the mechanisms by which the criteria for doctrinal competence are established and certified for a profession.17 Importantly, I do not claim that this role of validating epistemic authority always falls on doctrinal scholarship: the profession can have other mechanisms to certify doctrinal expertise.18 In that respect, the role of doctrinal scholarship is contingent – even though it has become more and more typical over time. I claim a sort of necessity in the other direction: doctrinal scholarship does not emerge if the relevant practice is not dominated by a profession. Doctrinal scholarship is made possible by the professionalization of social practices that have been authoritatively institutionalized. This dynamic is particularly conspicuous in the relationship between the law, the legal profession and legal scholarship. For the legal profession, doctrinal knowledge about law is central to defining its professional identity and setting the terms under which new members (future lawyers) can join. And legal doctrinal scholarship consolidates its position in relation to the practice of law by taking control over legal education (which is constituted as doctrinal training).19 This is what ties legal scholarship to the function of cultivating doctrinal knowledge about law. It does not mean that doctrinal scholars become the sole agents in generating doctrinal knowledge about the law. All members of the legal profession are agents in the processes by which the doctrinal elements of law are produced and consolidated.20 The distinctive contribution of legal scholars lies in providing academic validation to the doctrinal heritage (that the profession works with). In fact, this is what makes it possible for doctrinal expertise to be certified by university degrees. Crucially for us, this relatedness to doctrinal knowledge and the claim of epistemic authority by the profession sets legal scholarship up as a thoroughly interpretive and normative discipline. In fact, legal scholarship becomes normative in a particularly rich and multifarious sense. (1) Legal scholarship produces knowledge about the normative aspects of a social practice. It improves our ability to articulate normative positions within and about the law. (2) It generates epistemic authority to provide academic validation for expertise on the normative aspects of the legal practice. (3) Legal scholarship makes an explicit commitment to improving the legal practice (this is an implication of its role in professional legal education).

16 For a useful contrast here, one can think of a normative practice that is not controlled by authoritative institutions: the concrete ethical life of a community. Obviously, there can be (and there is) doctrinal knowledge about normative content here. There can also be expertise about the history or sociology of the practice. But there are no certified doctrinal experts of the ethical life of the community. 17 For the legitimating potential of the academia for professions, see Abbott, supra note 15 at 54. In relation to law, more specifically, see Stephen M Feldman, “The Transformation of an Academic Discipline: Law Professors in the Past and Future (or Toy Story Too)” (2004) 54 J Legal Educ 471 at 475. 18 The medieval English legal profession is a handy example. It had its own mechanisms to certify doctrinal expertise (in the ‘inns of court’) without resorting to the assistance of professional jurists. 19 This connection has been observed many times. See e.g. Alex M Johnson Jr, “Think Like a Lawyer, Work Like a Machine: The Dissonance between Law School and Law Practice” (1991) 64 S Cal L Rev 1231 at 1246; Christopher Tomlins, “Framing the Field of Law’s Disciplinary Encounters: A Historical Narrative” (2000) 34 Law & Soc’y Rev 911 at 924; Susan Bartie, “The Lingering Core of Legal Scholarship” (2010) 30 LS 345 at 348. For my take on the issue, see Bódig, “Legal Theory”, supra note 5 at 496–7. 20 C.f. RC van Caenegem, Judges, Legislators and Professors (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1987) at 67.

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III. The Uncertainty About Legal Doctrinal Scholarship and the Instrumentalist Challenge The significance of this abstract characterization becomes clearer if we relate it to the challenges facing legal doctrinal scholarship. To me, the account I have offered seems capable of capturing the basic character of doctrinal scholarship and has explanatory force concerning the practice of legal doctrinal scholarship. But I can see how unfamiliar many of its elements may look even to legal scholars. Part of the reason for this may be that the practice of legal scholarship has been detached from specific epistemological reflection on its own methodological profile. Most instructively, in theoretical reflection on legal scholarship, the characterdefining functional link with the legal profession (that is central to my account) is either ignored or treated as a burden on legal scholarship (that isolates it from ‘luckier’ disciplines21). In fact, fully developed accounts of the methodological profile of legal doctrinal scholarship are hard to come by. It is not that my idiosyncratic account is contrasted here with alternative conceptions of legal scholarship that legal scholars may be more comfortable with. What we have is pervasive uncertainty about the exact character of legal scholarship. And, whenever the changing circumstances (like the pressure on legal nationalism today) force legal scholarship to make adjustments to its scope and knowledge base, its vulnerability in the present disciplinary environment becomes exposed. The fact that the tensions are often manifested in attempts to reinvent legal scholarship reflects some awareness of the fact that, as long as we fail to find fitting epistemological models for legal scholarship, scholars have little chance of getting their methodology and knowledge base right. This is not just uncertainty about the way to reconcile the doctrinal focus of legal scholarship with the discursive norms of academic disciplinarity. There is uncertainty on a deeper level about the very doctrinal focus of legal scholarship. It has often proved tempting to conclude that the solution lies in detaching legal scholarship from its doctrinal roots.22 We know that non-doctrinal disciplines (like sociology, political science and economics) have their own perspectives on law. So, why not adjust legal scholarship to those perspectives if the doctrinal focus is a source of constant tensions? Of course, this is a challenge that has some historical depth for legal scholarship. Over the course of the nineteenth century, the status of legal scholarship had changed quite profoundly. Doctrinal knowledge has lost much of its epistemic prestige – particularly in the academic world.23 The emergence of social sciences in the nineteenth century raised stark questions about the validity and reliability of all forms of doctrinal knowledge on human relations and social interactions. Lawyers and legal scholarship seemed stuck with an outdated model of generating knowledge: drawing formalistic conclusions from normative materials and knowing very little of the social context in which the law is practised. Emerging social science methodologies posed tricky challenges to legal scholars who typically command intensely practice-specific knowledge (knowledge about a particular area of law in a particular legal system). That knowledge does not easily ‘travel’ to other disciplines or even other fields of legal practice. Figuring out the relevance of that knowledge for anything beyond the pertinent practice requires hermeneutic mediation. Attempts to create methodological frameworks that can work with more general claims about law (like the otherwise impressive rise of comparative law scholarship) did not change the dominant patterns of the practice of legal scholarship. In light of this historical trajectory, it is sometimes the survival of legal scholarship (with a doctrinal focus) that may call for explanation. Part of the explanation is, of course, sociological: the legal profession never gave up on legal doctrinal scholarship (despite the occasional outbursts of frustration with it).24 But part of the explanation can be captured in more theoretical terms. We should remember that doctrinal knowledge is premised on a characteristically non-instrumental approach to law. Even though alternative disciplinary

21 Samuel talks of a ‘[law] faculty that is largely enslaved to the outlook of the profession’: Geoffrey Samuel, “Is Legal Knowledge Cumulative?” (2012) 32 LS 448 at 477 [Samuel, “Cumulative”]. Tushnet argues that its role in professional education isolates legal scholarship from the intellectual trends of the social sciences: see Mark Tushnet, “Legal Scholarship: Its Causes and Cure” (1981) 90 Yale LJ 1205 at 1206. 22 See reflection on Geoffrey Samuel below. 23 C.f. Mark van Hoecke, “Legal Doctrine: Which Method(s) for What Kind of Discipline?” in Mark van Hoecke, ed, Methodologies of Legal Research (Oxford, UK: Hart, 2011) 1. 24 See e.g. Harry T Edwards, “The Growing Disjunction between Legal Education and the Legal Profession” (1992) 91 Mich L Rev 34.

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perspectives often promised marked methodological advantages (and more academic prestige), they never offered a feasible way to sustain this non-instrumental take on law. Non-doctrinal disciplinary perspectives do not simply move away from doctrinal knowledge. They also leave it unaccounted for because they do not really have a way to accommodate ‘doctrine talk’. In fact, they are often tempted to discount it as mere ‘window dressing’.25 And, by losing the sense for the relevance of the doctrinal aspect of law, it is difficult to imagine what could prevent the drift into straightforwardly instrumental perspectives on law. (Instrumentalism cuts through the methodological conundrum by reducing or subjecting the normative content of law to manifestations of external forces – power relations, social interests, political ideologies, etc.) This drift is even faster if the scholar opts for disciplinary perspectives that have their own explicit value assumptions (and thereby normative content) – like economics or policy science. It is no accident that experiments with non-doctrinal perspectives brought about the lure of instrumentalism (especially in the twentieth century26) in legal scholarship, and that it keeps returning in different guises. The trouble is that giving in to the lure of instrumentalism simply does not offer a picture of lawyering (and legal reasoning in particular) that insiders to the practice would recognize as accurate or even illuminating. By circumventing the doctrinal aspect of law, our ability to understand the law gets impoverished. We need a disciplinary perspective that is capable of addressing the doctrinal aspect of law adequately, and there is no candidate apart from legal doctrinal scholarship. This leaves us with a methodological conundrum about the ways in which doctrinal and non-doctrinal perspectives on law can be reconciled with one another (and can supplement each other). The dynamics of this conundrum can be seen in recent methodological debates about legal scholarship in many countries (and especially in the US).27 I provide here a brief outline of the positions in the British debates only. There, the conundrum is typically conceptualized as the problem of the clash between external and internal approaches to law.28 It tends to take concrete form in the guise of the challenge of spreading socio-legal scholarship (inspired by social sciences and focused on the role of law in society).29 I see three characteristic positions outlined in the British debates. For the sake of simplicity, I point to one representative for each. One position is represented by Geoffrey Samuel who sees a struggle between two different paradigms of scholarship: the ‘authority paradigm’ and the ‘enquiry paradigm’30 (where the ‘authority paradigm’ is roughly in line with the way I have characterized doctrinal scholarship above). For Samuel, the way forward is obvious. Legal scholarship must escape the authority paradigm.31 Legal scholarship has been trapped in it (due to functional links with the profession32) but it does not withstand the scrutiny of more conscious epistemological (and even historical) reflection. The future belongs to those who re-imagine legal scholarship outside the authority paradigm – integrated into the social sciences.33

25 See Emerson H Tiller & Frank B Cross, “What is Legal Doctrine?” (2006) 100 Nw UL Rev 517 at 522. 26 Of course, the conscious effort to take an instrumental perspective on law is the most obvious in Legal Realism. See Karl Llewellyn, “Some Realism about Realism” (1931) 44 Harv L Rev 1222 at 1249. The lure of instrumentalism is often manifested in the claim that Legal Realism was a game-changer for legal scholarship. See e.g. Tushnet, supra note 21 at 1207, 1216; Robert W Gordon, “Lawyers, Scholars, and the ‘Middle Ground’” (1993) 91 Mich L Rev 2075 at 2083. 27 See e.g. Tushnet, supra note 21; Edward L Rubin, “The Practice and Discourse of Legal Scholarship” (1988) 86 Mich L Rev 1835; Alan D Freeman, “Truth and Mystification in Legal Scholarship” (1981) 90 Yale LJ 1229. 28 See Christopher McCrudden, “Legal Research and the Social Sciences” (2006) 122 Law Q Rev 632 at 642. 29 See ibid. at 637–8. See also Douglas W Vick, “Interdisciplinarity and the Discipline of Law” (2004) 31 JL & Soc’y 163 at 184. It is not just that scholars who belong to the socio-legal paradigm have found a foothold in law schools; many legal scholars were tempted (or felt compelled) to open up their research to other (non-doctrinal) disciplinary perspectives. For the difficulties it has caused for many legal scholars, see Fiona Cownie, Legal Academics: Culture and Identities (Oxford, UK: Hart, 2004) at 49–58. 30 See Geoffrey Samuel, “Is Law Really a Social Science? A View from Comparative Law” (2008) 67 Cambridge LJ 288 at 317 [Samuel, “Social Science”]. 31 See Geoffrey Samuel, “Interdisciplinarity and the Authority Paradigm: Should Law Be Taken Seriously by Scientists and Social Scientists?” (2009) 36 JL & Soc’y 431 at 449. 32 See Samuel, “Social Science”, supra note 30 at 313; Samuel, “Cumulative”, supra note 21 at 468. 33 Some even speak of the abandonment of the doctrinal project as an accomplished fact. See Anthony Bradney, “Law as a Parasitic Discipline” (1998) 25 JL & Soc’y 71 at 72.

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Christopher McCrudden also acknowledges a tension at the heart of legal scholarship. He does not, however, hope to relieve that pressure by dispensing with doctrinally oriented legal scholarship. He argues that the long-term tendency is a sort of convergence: the methodologically different approaches mutually erode one another.34 Legal scholarship comes to embrace methodological plurality, and it is manifested in the emergence of academic work that combines internal and external approaches to law.35 A third position is represented by Douglas Vick who sees the significance of the remarkable staying power of doctrinal research. The challenge of alternative disciplinary perspectives does not result in the withering away of doctrinal legal scholarship. The clash of different perspectives indeed resulted in the spread of interdisciplinary scholarship36 but it has not challenged the core identity of the discipline.37 Assimilation into the culture of other disciplines is not a realistic prospect. It may be pretty obvious that my own views are close to Vick’s. I am worried about the loss of the doctrinal perspective on law in both Samuel’s and McCrudden’s account of legal scholarship. Samuel is ready to sacrifice it to assimilate legal scholarship to the social sciences, and McCrudden does not seem to appreciate the distinctiveness of the doctrinal perspective.38 Of course, merely by siding with Vick will not sort out the challenges underlying the methodological conundrum. We need a more profound account of what generates the dilemmas of external and internal approaches to law. Although I cannot lay out this account fully in this chapter, its outlines might just become visible over the course of this analysis. We know what we are looking for: an account that preserves the doctrinal perspective on law in order to avoid the drift into the kind of instrumentalism that would impoverish our understanding of law. In other words, we need a coherent non-instrumentalist vision for legal scholarship to justify its doctrinal focus. But there is another side to the challenge that I have not really addressed so far: emphasizing that the distinctiveness of legal doctrinal scholarship cannot turn into an insular internalism. The doctrinal heritage that makes up legal competence is constantly shaped by sources external to the law. Under changing circumstances, legal scholarship must work on renewing its analytical and interpretive tools. Rigid isolation from alternative (and non-doctrinal) disciplinary perspectives is not a viable methodological option. This is where the conundrum actually lies: how can a discipline that is bound to borrow ideas and conceptual constructs from non-doctrinal disciplines preserve its doctrinal, internalist and non-instrumentalist character? Framing the issue this way indicates what makes the most high profile contemporary non-instrumentalist initiative – Ernest Weinrib’s – ultimately unattractive. Nobody has combated the instrumentalization of doctrinal knowledge about law (or, at least private law) as hard and as consistently as Weinrib over the years.39 But his non-instrumentalism came to be rooted in a distinctive kind of formalism that seeks to develop a doctrinally relevant understanding of law exclusively from within.40 The problem is that this robust internalism runs contrary to the experience that the law integrates values and concepts from outside into its doctrinal structures. Doctrinal constructs are not typically developed exclusively from law’s own core values (like legality or some specific sense of justice).

34 See McCrudden, supra note 28 at 642. 35 See ibid. 36 See Vick, supra note 29 at 184. 37 See ibid. at 191. 38 This claim is inspired by my research on international human rights law. There are no rigid disciplinary divides within human rights scholarship, and relying on varied sources of information with varied methodological pedigree is quite common. Nevertheless, works that we could qualify as doctrinal human rights scholarship very clearly stand out due to their explicit normative orientation and their consistent effort to anchor their claims in a credible interpretation of authoritative human rights documents. For an example, see Magdalene Sepúlveda, The Nature of the Obligations under the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (Antwerp: Intersentia, 2003). 39 See e.g. Ernest J Weinrib, “Can Law Survive Legal Education?” (2007) 60 Vand L Rev 401 at 405–14. 40 See Ernest J Weinrib, “Legal Formalism: On the Immanent Rationality of Law” (1988) 97 Yale LJ 949. Fried is not far from this position when he argues that the law is an ‘independent, distinct part of the structure of value’: Charles Fried, “The Artificial Reason of the Law or: What Lawyers Know” (1981) 60 Tex L Rev 35 at 57.

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IV. Interdisciplinary Engagement The lesson from the previous section is that developing a non-instrumentalist vision for legal scholarship crucially depends on striking a balance between openness towards alternative (non-doctrinal) disciplinary perspectives and preserving internalism towards the legal practice. If that is the case, getting the terms of interdisciplinary engagement for legal scholarship right is of strategic importance for the methodology of legal scholarship. It is decisive for finding an adequate knowledge base for legal scholarship, as well as for enabling legal scholarship to adapt to its ever-changing social and disciplinary environment. I complete my analysis in this chapter by making a few points regarding the issue of interdisciplinary engagement. First, we need to be clear on what enables legal scholarship to preserve its identity in interdisciplinary engagements (what guarantees that the communication will indeed be between disciplines?).41 This is a clarity I have sought, with the analysis in Section II, by laying out the distinctly normative and interpretive orientation of legal scholarship. One way to put the point is that, uniquely among disciplines, legal scholarship does not treat the law as the mere object of scholarly reflection: the normative content of the law also provides the conceptual framework that one must rely on to make sense of the legal practice.42 Second, we need to be more specific on what makes interdisciplinary engagement necessary for legal scholarship. The underlying conceptual point was already made above: legal scholarship represents the doctrinal aspect of law, that other disciplines cannot accommodate, but it cannot adjust doctrinal knowledge to changing circumstances without interdisciplinary communication. Of course, this conceptual point can play out in a number of ways but there is one model of interdisciplinary engagement that fits the character of the present analysis and brings out the conceptual dynamics it relies on. The necessity of interdisciplinary engagement has often been derived from the otherwise plausible idea that legal scholarship needs to engage more with the social and political environment in which the law operates. However, contrary to what may seem intuitively plausible, it does not justify shifting the focus to knowing more about the impact legal institutions have on their social environment. (That is a problem other disciplines – like sociology – are much better positioned to handle.) From the disciplinary perspective of legal scholarship, it is more fitting to ask how the changing social environment and shifting political trends interact with the normative functioning of legal institutions. How do they affect the conditions of maintaining the doctrinal coherence of the normative content of law? I have mentioned above that legal scholarship is normative in a particularly rich sense. One aspect of this normative orientation is that legal scholarship is explicitly committed to improving the legal practice. That makes legal scholars important agents in the (essentially political) discourse on what changes to the law are warranted and how they can be implemented without system-level dysfunctions. Also, doctrinal knowledge (that legal scholars command) is primarily concerned with what is justifiable without falling foul of the (authoritatively solidified) law. Crucially, this knowledge is also central to the competence that qualifies one to figure out what changes in the law are feasible without subverting its doctrinal coherence. This is the competence that makes legal scholars active agents in doctrinal development. However, this competence remains one-sided and inadequate (and it does not qualify for the role of driving doctrinal development) without a sense of what social issues require doctrinal adjustments and what ideas call for ‘doctrinal encoding’.43 Legal scholarship can only develop this more complex competence in interdisciplinary engagements. It is mainly because legal scholarship cannot rely on a raw political logic in taking a stand on the demands to make changes in the law. It needs academic validation for the substantive ideas underlying its work of constructing new doctrinal devices. Other disciplines must vouch for the claim that, for example, indirect discrimination is a genuine problem that calls for new regulation, that we need to overhaul the mechanisms of popular representation in the political system, or that we need more imaginative enforcement measures in 41 C.f. Vick, supra note 29 at 188. 42 I rely here on a brilliant insight by Pauline Westerman. See her “Open or Autonomous? The Debate on Legal Methodology as a Reflection of the Debate on Law” in Mark van Hoecke, ed, Methodologies of Legal Research (Oxford, UK: Hart, 2011) at 90–94. 43 It is not unreasonable to assume that ‘doctrinal encoding’ of ideals, political aspirations and policies that seek incorporation into the normative body of law is the core activity of legal scholarship in terms of doctrinal development.

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environmental law or international human rights law. This is why legal scholars need to be able to find their way around the disciplines related to their own fields of law (be it ecology, political sociology or economics).

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V. Conclusion In this chapter I have addressed issues about the epistemological profile of legal doctrinal scholarship. I was exploring the place we can find in our current disciplinary environment for a normative discipline that consciously limits its validity claims to historically contingent practices. I organized my take on this issue around the claim that legal doctrinal scholarship can claim to perform unique functions as an interpretive and intensely normative discipline – the only one capable of providing adequate academic reflection on the variety of ways in which doctrinal knowledge interacts with a complex social practice like law. The consolidation of disciplinary identity for legal scholarship requires us to capture doctrinal knowledge and develop our understanding of doctrinal scholarship from there. I have sought to take a few steps in that very direction in this chapter. I am cautiously optimistic about the prospects of legal scholarship but my analysis does not hide the formidable challenges present. Developing better methodological models for legal scholarship calls for striking a sensitive balance between maintaining the doctrinal focus of legal scholarship and keeping it open to alternative disciplinary perspectives. It is often a tricky challenge to negotiate the potentially vast differences in methodological commitments, background assumptions and epistemological models.44 Interdisciplinary engagement is necessary but interdisciplinary scholarship can easily falter. It has a better chance of succeeding, however, if we understand that interdisciplinary engagement is not about detaching legal scholarship from its doctrinal character but renewing its conceptual arsenal and getting its knowledge base right.

44 I believe that some have found this balance. Standing up for the centrality of interpretive doctrinal analysis can be coupled with a heightened theoretical and methodological awareness (born from encounters with other disciplinary perspectives). For an example, see Allan Beever & Charles Rickett, “Interpretive Legal Theory and the Academic Lawyer” (2005) 68 Mod L Rev 320.

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Chapter 7

The Structure of Stateless Law

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Michelle Cumyn*

I. Introduction Clearly, there is danger in the erosion of the modern State from a social, political and environmental point of view. What about the law? In a receding State, will legal norms become indistinguishable from other norms? Will the legal system become disorganized, the law incoherent? Will legal answers be increasingly difficult to find? Will consensus about what the law requires begin to fray? As a doctrinal writer and law professor in a mixed jurisdiction, I repeatedly face the challenge of the legal system’s growing complexity. Equally overwhelming is the constant production of knowledge in other disciplines that contributes to a better understanding of the law. The domain of legal research and teaching is not as easily circumscribed as it used to be. Legal scholarship meets open doors at every turn. The search for knowledge and understanding makes one feel at times like one is trapped in a boundless maze.1 The question I wish to address in this chapter is therefore the following: how do we keep the law from becoming unmanageable? Specialization is a possible strategy. Many legal academics and professionals centre their attention on a tiny area of the law and explore everything there is to know about it, from a legal and from a non-legal perspective. Yet the law is also in need of generalists who are able to articulate the connections between its constituent parts, so that it can continue to hold together as a system. It might occur to the generalist to turn to legal theory for guidance. The positivist definition of legal systems has some appeal. According to it, a lawyer needs to learn how to access the sources of valid law within his or her own jurisdiction. Positivism adapts to the complexity of modern law by refining the criteria that define sources of valid law. It copes with the overwhelming presence of knowledge from other disciplines and from other legal traditions by keeping such knowledge outside the positive law. As it happens, doctrinal writers, law professors and legal professionals are often labelled ‘positivists’. It is said that we study, teach or practise ‘positive law’. This suggests that we endorse positivism in some sense, whether legal positivism, as just mentioned, or scientific positivism. Yet the methods of legal scholarship are incompatible with both, as I will demonstrate. Legal scholarship consists essentially in the interpretation of authoritative texts or text analogues: it is inherently hermeneutical.2 Moreover, legal scholarship has been in existence for as long as the law itself, which is not true of positivism. In this chapter, I hope to show how positivism has stifled, but not eliminated, traditional legal scholarship. To face the challenges of Stateless law, legal scholars must reject positivism explicitly and engage in renewed discussions about legal methodology.3 * The research for this chapter is part of a project entitled ‘Basic-Level Legal Categories’ funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) (with Frédéric Gosselin). I am grateful for the research assistance of Sonya Bernard, Robert Sharp and Claudie Wagner-Lapierre. 1 Umberto Eco, From the Tree to the Labyrinth: Historical Studies on the Sign and Interpretation, translated by Anthony Oldcorn (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2014) at ch 1. 2 In his paper “Interpretation and the Sciences of Man”, Charles Taylor set hermeneutics and scientific positivism (or logical empiricism) in sharp contrast: Charles Taylor, “Interpretation and the Sciences of Man”, Philosophy and the Human Sciences: Philosophical Papers, vol 2 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1985). This paper has persuaded me that legal scholarship is hermeneutical and cannot possibly aspire to logical empiricism. 3 In recent years, the influence of modern hermeneutics has spawned interesting and fruitful debates regarding statutory interpretation. These will hopefully continue and extend to other topics in legal methodology. See e.g. John Bell, “Legal Research and the Distinctiveness of Comparative Law” in Mark van Hoecke, ed, Methodologies of Legal Research: Which Kind of Method for What Kind of Discipline? (Oxford: Hart, 2013) 155; Geoffrey Samuel, “Does One 1

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It is a common error to underestimate the importance of legal systematization, which helps to secure the stability of legal systems over time. Several actors have a role in defining legal categories and their classification, but legal scholars play the most important part, and one that was never acknowledged by the positivists.

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II. Positivism and Legal Methodology Legal positivism presents at least three different facets. First, as a theory of law, it makes the claim that ‘[i]n any legal system, whether a given norm is legally valid, and hence whether it forms part of the law of that system, depends on its sources, not its merits’ (the ‘sources thesis’).4 In other words, the definition of law is secular and value-free. It contains no requirement that the law should embody certain moral ideals that are universal or shared, nor does it prevent the law from espousing such ideals. The theory of legal positivism is in contrast with the Natural law tradition, where the opposite claims are made.5 Second, legal positivism refers to a period in history of a few centuries, during which States in the Western world have monopolized to a large extent the production and enforcement of legal norms. Law has become territorial: each State boasts its own legal system. On the whole, national legal systems have been successful in producing law that is sophisticated and effective, and to keep this law fairly within their control.6 Positivist legal theory is a product of historical legal positivism. Its early proponents set out to describe and explain the close relationship that exists between the modern State and its legal system.7 In recent decades though, the legal pluralists have shown that even at the height of historical positivism, law has continued to be secreted outside the State.8 Today, legal theorists of the positivist school are careful to articulate their definition of law without any reference to the State.9 Nevertheless, I doubt whether positivist legal theory will outlive historical legal positivism, if only because reformulations of the sources thesis to accommodate non-State law and their instantiation in contemporary legal systems have lost the virtue of simplicity. They are not as readily accessible and as intuitively compelling as the original positivist theories were in the context in which they were framed. A third facet of legal positivism relates more directly to legal methodology. Traditional legal science is hermeneutical: it concerns itself with the interpretation of legal texts that are authoritative for a number of reasons: their origin, their resonance with prevailing ideas and values, their power of explanation or suggestion, even their aesthetic qualities.10 Under the joint influence of scientific and legal positivism, many legal scholars in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were drawn to the very different model of logical empiricism. The view that legal positivism is partly responsible for this shift appears to be controversial. I will explain briefly what I consider to be the connections between legal positivism and logical empiricism in relation to legal methodology. Logical empiricism dominates the natural sciences and many of the social sciences because it is believed to set the appropriate standard for the acquisition of valid scientific knowledge (scientific positivism). Need an Understanding of Methodology in Law before One Can Understand Methodology in Comparative Law?” in Mark van Hoecke, ed, Methodologies of Legal Research: Which Kind of Method for What Kind of Discipline? (Oxford: Hart, 2013) 177; Michelle Cumyn & Mélanie Samson, “La méthodologie juridique en quête d’identité” (2013) 71 Revue interdisciplinaire d’études juridiques 1.  4 John Gardner, Law as a Leap of Faith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012) at 19.  5 HLA Hart, The Concept of Law (Oxford: Clarendon, 1961) at ch 8–9; Joseph Raz, The Authority of Law: Essays on Law and Morality, 2d ed (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009) [Raz, Authority of Law].  6 H Patrick Glenn, Legal Traditions of the World, 4th ed (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010) at 160–61, 262–9.  7 See e.g. Hans Kelsen, Pure Theory of Law, 2d ed, translated by Max Knight (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967) at ch 6.  8 Sally Engle Merry, “Legal Pluralism” (1988) 22 Law & Soc’y Rev 869.  9 Gardner, supra note 4 at ch 11. 10 Authoritative legal texts traditionally include doctrinal scholarship and, more generally, sources that are persuasive. See e.g. H Patrick Glenn, “Persuasive Authority” (1987) 32 McGill LJ 261; in the present volume, Frédéric Zenati-Castaing, “Non ratione imperii, sed imperio rationis”, ch 12; Nicholas Kasirer, ed, Le droit civil, avant tout un style? (Montreal: Editions Thémis, 2004).

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A number of distinct methodologies in different fields have been developed from this model, which brings together two important strands in the history of science: empiricism and rationalism. Empiricism calls for the use of ‘brute data’ as the basis for scientific knowledge:

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[T]he basic building block of knowledge on this view is … a unit of information which is not the deliverance of a judgement, which has by definition no element in it of reading or interpretation. … The highest ambition would be to build our knowledge from such building blocks by judgements which could be anchored in a certainty beyond subjective intuition.11

Formal logic is an equally powerful tool for deriving knowledge in a way that is objective and neutral. It can be used to build abstract models or procedures, or it can be combined with the brute data: [T]he logical empiricists added to the armoury of traditional empiricism, which set great score by the method of induction, the whole domain of logical and mathematical inference which had been central to the rationalist position … and which offered another brand of unquestionable certainty.12

I will show that legal positivism directs legal scholars and professionals to apply the model of logical empiricism to legal reasoning in the following way:

Figure 7.1

Model of logical empiricism

The relationship between legal positivism and logical empiricism was manifest at the end of the nineteenth century and beginning of the twentieth century, when the views of the early positivists coincided with an approach to legal method variously described as formalism, analytic jurisprudence or conceptualism.13 In the United States, formalism was derided by the legal realists, who insisted that legal answers cannot simply be derived by logical deduction from a priori rules or principles.14 Though opposed to formalism and legal positivism, the legal realists believed that the law should aspire to the status of a science; they too endorsed a version of logical empiricism.15 Following H.L.A. Hart, legal positivists in the English tradition responded to the realist attack by ‘mov[ing] the question of discretion … to the very core of positivism’.16 They agreed that legal reasoning cannot always operate as depicted above and that courts often exercise discretion in deciding a case. To allow for this, they introduced a distinction between ‘norm-application’ and ‘norm-alteration’.17 Hart first set out the distinction in the following terms:

11 Taylor, supra note 2 at 19. 12 Ibid. at 19–20. 13 Anthony J Sebok, Legal Positivism in American Jurisprudence (Cambridge, Mass: Cambridge University Press, 1998) at 39–47 & 97–112. 14 Ibid. at 80–81. 15 Ibid. at 33–5, 59–61, 104, 106. 16 Ibid. at 112. 17 Gardner, supra note 4 at 46.

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Stateless Law Whichever device, precedent or legislation, is chosen for the communication of standards of behaviour, these, however smoothly they work over the great mass of ordinary cases, will, at some point where their application is in question, prove indeterminate; they will have what has been termed an open texture.18

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The open texture of law means that there are, indeed, areas of conduct where much must be left to be developed by courts or officials striking a balance, in the light of circumstances, between competing interests which vary in weight from case to case. Nonetheless, the life of the law consists to a very large extent in the guidance both of officials and private individuals by determinate rules which, unlike the applications of variable standards, do not require from them a fresh judgment from case to case.19

Joseph Raz developed the distinction as follows: It is primarily in deciding cases regarding which the law is unsettled (as well as in distinguishing and reversing settled law) that judges are thought to develop the law using moral, social, and other non-legal arguments. It is when deciding cases where the law is settled that the judges are thought of as using their legal skills in applying the law. The sources thesis explains and systematizes these distinctions. According to it, the law on a question is settled when legally binding sources provide its solution. In such cases judges are typically said to apply the law, and since it is source-based, its application involves technical, legal skills in reasoning from those sources and does not call for moral acumen. If a legal question is not answered by standards deriving from legal sources then it lacks a legal answer – the law on the question is unsettled. In deciding such cases courts inevitably break new (legal) ground and their decision develops the law (at least in precedent-based legal systems). Naturally, their decisions in such cases rely at least partly on moral and other extra-legal considerations.20

The distinction between norm-application and norm-alteration implicitly relies on the use of different methodologies. Norm-application continues to refer to legal formalism, conceptualism, mechanical jurisprudence or syllogistic reasoning,21 that is, the model of legal reasoning based on logical empiricism depicted above. The facts and legal rules are given as brute data, and a legal answer is derived logically from them. Picking out the relevant facts and rules or combining them might require certain legal skills, but the process of doing so is neutral and objective, and it does not rely on extra-legal considerations. There is only one correct answer when one applies law which is determinate or settled (by hypothesis). The answer does not depend for its validity on the authority of the decision-maker, who has added nothing to the law: it derives from the validity of the norms being applied. Anyone, therefore, may apply the law, including private individuals to themselves. Norm-alteration is entirely a different matter. This includes changing settled law and deciding cases where the law is unsettled or indeterminate. The decision-maker departs from the previous model and adopts a different form of reasoning (possibly hermeneutic). The decision might, for example, reinterpret existing law in a novel way. The validity of the decision no longer rests on the validity of the rules being applied, since they do not determine the answer. Instead, it derives from the authority of the decision-maker. Only legal officials recognized by the sources thesis may validly alter the law. I do not find it plausible that applying the law and altering it draw on different forms of legal reasoning. That there are clear legal answers in some cases and not others can be explained in another way: the former are cases where the relevant considerations converge, while the latter are cases where they conflict. In other words, the sorts of moral and social arguments that positivists admit enter into norm-alteration likely form part of all legal reasoning. Of course, such a view is not acceptable to the positivists, because it undermines the sources thesis. Still, let us assume that the positivists have presented an adequate theory of adjudication in which the sources thesis is upheld by the courts’ applying existing law some of the time, while the courts’ discretion is also accounted for by their having the authority to alter the law, which they do the rest of the time. 18 Hart, supra note 5 at 124. 19 Ibid. at 132. 20 Raz, Authority of Law, supra note 5 at 49–50. 21 Hart, supra note 5 at 125–6; Gardner, supra note 4 at 76, 186.

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What are the implications of such a theory for legal scholarship and the practice of law? Gardner writes:

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If someone happens to acquire a duty to determine what the law of Indiana says on some subject on some occasion, then the truth of [the sources thesis] affects how she should proceed. According to [the sources thesis], she should look for sources of Indiana law, not ask herself what it would be most meritorious for people in Indiana to do.22

Most legal scholars and professionals would agree that they have a duty to determine what the law says or requires on some subject on some occasion. If that is so, then modern legal positivism directs them to the model of norm-application, not norm-alteration, in exercising this duty.23 Kelsen held a similar view: The interpretation of law by the science of law (jurisprudence) must be sharply distinguished as nonauthentic from the interpretation by legal organs. Jurisprudential interpretation is purely cognitive ascertainment of the meaning of legal norms. In contradistinction to the interpretation by legal organs, jurisprudential interpretation does not create law. … Jurisprudential interpretation can do no more than exhibit all possible meanings of a legal norm. Jurisprudence as cognition of law cannot decide between the possibilities exhibited by it, but must leave the decision to the legal organ who, according to the legal order, is authorized to apply the law. An attorney who, in the interest of his client, propounds the judge only one of several possible interpretations of the legal norm to be applied in this case, or a writer who in his commentary extolls a specific interpretation among many possible ones as the only ‘correct’ one, does not render a function of legal science, but of legal politics. He seeks to influence legislation.24

Yet the positivists also recognize that legal scholars and professionals often do ‘much more complicated things’ than just state or apply the law.25 Indeed, lawyers may be required to develop arguments of the normalteration kind, such as novel interpretations of existing law.26 Such endeavours are separate from the task of stating and applying the positive law: positivist legal theorists invariably present them as a form of advocacy.27 According to the sources thesis, legal scholars and professionals may not, of their own authority, add anything to the positive law, since that would be ‘nonauthentic’. Either they would be violating their professional duty by misrepresenting existing law, or they would be usurping the role of a legal official. The picture that emerges is completely unrealistic because legal scholarship develops the law as it is engaged in presenting it. In striving to make sense of a mass of partially convergent, partially conflicting authoritative legal materials, legal scholars make choices that involve discretion. It would be artificial to consider that interpretations developed by legal scholars and professionals become the law only on the day when they are first recognized by a legal official such as a court. The process by which scholarly interpretations become the law is a much more gradual one, which depends on their being accepted and relayed by the legal community as a whole. 22 Gardner, supra note 4 at 23. See also Hart, supra note 5 at 59. 23 Gardner explains that the sources thesis is in itself ‘normatively inert’, in that ‘[i]t does not provide any guidance at all on what anyone should do about anything on any occasion’: Gardner, supra note 4 at 23–4. The duty of legal scholars and professionals to provide accurate legal advice derives not from positivism, but from ethical and legal obligations attached to their professional role. It is the combination of such a duty with the information provided by the sources thesis that generates an understanding of how they ‘should proceed’. In this limited sense, legal positivism does direct legal scholars and professionals to use certain methods and not others in fulfilling their professional role. 24 Kelsen, supra note 7 at 355–6. It is true that legal scholarship, when it oversteps the limits set for it by positivism (as it usually does), engages to some extent in politics. This raises legitimate concerns. See e.g. Rosemary J Coombe, “‘Same as It Ever Was’: Rethinking the Politics of Legal Interpretation” (1989) 34 McGill LJ 603. 25 Gardner, supra note 4 at 190. 26 Joseph Raz distinguishes between ‘a conserving interpretation that merely states the law as it is and an innovatory one that develops and changes it’: Between Authority and Interpretation: On the Theory of Law and Practical Reason (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009) at 359 [Raz, Between Authority and Interpretation]. For Gardner, interpretative activity straddles the distinction between norm-application and norm-alteration, because some rules of interpretation are part of the positive law and provide a determinate answer to a problem of interpretation, while other such problems can only be resolved by a judge referring to merit-based arguments: supra note 4 at 46–7. 27 Raz, Between Authority and Interpretation, supra note 26 at 353; Gardner, supra note 4 at 190.

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Admittedly, several legal scholars and professionals still define themselves as positivists, though often reluctantly. A plausible explanation is that legal positivism and scientific positivism converge and support each other.28 Scientific positivism has had tremendous appeal in the human sciences, including law.29 As noted by Taylor, ‘[t]he demand has been for a level of certainty which can only be attained by breaking beyond the [hermeneutical] circle’.30 Breaking beyond the circle becomes possible if the law can be reduced to brute data and if legal reasoning can be modelled on formal logic: the promise of legal positivism.31 Norm-application can yield an objective and determinate answer if logical empiricism becomes the model for legal reasoning: the promise of scientific positivism.32 Legal scholarship has not been improved by positivism. Efforts to draw nearer to logical empiricism, in the hopes of achieving greater certainty and scientific rigour, have not been a success.33 On the contrary, they have brought legal scholarship into disrepute. In this section, I have focused on legal rules and their interpretation, which have always been central to the positivist debate. The shortcomings of positivism from the perspective of legal methodology are even more obvious when one considers legal categories and their classification. III. Legal Categories and Classification Legal positivism has provided a theory of legal systems. In the model developed by Hart, the combination of primary and secondary rules accounts for the legal system’s unity and capacity for change.34 In the model proposed by Kelsen, the hierarchy of legal norms plays an identical role.35 28 Positivist legal theorists have stated clearly that they do not endorse scientific positivism or its methods in their work. For instance, they make no attempt to prove empirically that their definition of legal systems is correct. My intention is not to suggest otherwise. My argument is only that the sources thesis requires legal actors to endorse scientific positivism when they state or apply the law. In other words, legal positivism and scientific positivism converge not at the level of legal theory, but at the level of legal methodology. 29 The following scholars, for example, continue to propose legal methods derived from logical empiricism: Mark van Hoecke, “Legal Doctrine: Which Method(s) for What Kind of Discipline?” in Mark van Hoecke, ed, Methodologies of Legal Research: Which Kind of Method for What Kind of Discipline? (Oxford: Hart, 2013) 1; Jaap Hage, “The Method of a Truly Normative Legal Science” in Mark van Hoecke, ed, Methodologies of Legal Research: Which Kind of Method for What Kind of Discipline? (Oxford: Hart, 2013) 19; Mike McConville & Wing Hong Chui, Research Methods for Law (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007); Pamela N Gray, Artificial Legal Intelligence (Brookfield, Vt: Dartmouth, 1997). 30 Taylor, supra note 2 at 18. 31 Legal argument naturally uses deductive, inductive and analogical reasoning, as well as proof by contradiction, in the same way that argument in everyday life does, but the strict conditions in which such forms of reasoning meet the requirements of formal logic are rarely present. See e.g. Antoinette Virieux-Reymond, La logique formelle (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1962) at 10–14. That is why the force of an argument in everyday life or in law cannot rely entirely on its form; it must rely in part on agreement over the substance of what is being advanced and on a common understanding of the relevant context. The model of norm-application, though, relies implicitly on formal logic since it excludes extra-legal considerations. 32 See e.g. Brian Z Tamanaha, Beyond the Formalist-Realist Divide: The Role of Politics in Judging (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press 2009). Tamanaha shows that lawyers and judges in the US at the end of the nineteenth century and beginning of the twentieth century never endorsed legal formalism, although some jurisprudence scholars who aspired to make the law more scientific invoked it as an ideal (ibid. at 29–31, 44). Tamanaha argues that formalism is largely a straw man later constructed by the legal realists. I would add that formalism has endured as a model for legal reasoning because of its relationship with scientific and legal positivism. For evidence that formalism still implicitly refers to logical empiricism, see Larry Alexander, “What Are Principles, and Do They Exist?”, San Diego Legal Studies Paper No 13–119, 10 June 2013, online: Social Science Research Network (defining rules as algorithms at 2–3). For evidence that the formalist-realist dichotomy continues to inform the distinction between norm-application (formalism) and norm-alteration (realism), see Frederick Schauer, “Formalism” (1987–88) 97 Yale LJ 509. Schauer equates formalism with rule-application. 33 Norberto Bobbio, an Italian legal positivist, spoke tellingly of the ‘inferiority complex of the jurist with regard to other scientists’: “The Science of Law and the Analysis of Language” in Anna Pintore & Mario Jori, eds, Law and Language: The Italian Analytical School (Liverpool: Deborah Charles, 1997) at 22. He urged jurists to make their methods more scientific. 34 Hart, supra note 5 at 17 and at ch 5. 35 Kelsen, supra note 7 at 221–2.

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Legal positivism has displaced the doctrinal conception of legal system, which refers to the grouping of legal rules within categories and to the classification of categories within the broader divisions of law.36 Legal categories and their classification result in part from the design of statutes, and in part from the clusters that form as court decisions refer to other court decisions, but systematization by doctrinal writers and law professors is paramount.37 Systematization involves analysing, synthesizing, explaining, framing and ordering legal categories. Legal positivists underestimate the normative significance of systematization and minimize the role of legal scholarship in that regard.38 In the legal methodology literature, treatment of legal categories and their classification tends to be brief, and it tends to be descriptive rather than theoretical and critical.39 However, there has been growing interest in legal classification on the part of common law scholars in recent years.40 Additional insights have been gained through the work of researchers in the cognitive sciences on categorization.41 Inspired by this research, some legal scholars have shown that legal categories may reflect and reinforce unacceptable biases in the law.42 For better or for worse, legal categories play an essential role in legal reasoning, as I will demonstrate in the following pages. At the outset, I should emphasize the difference between normative and cognitive legal classifications. A normative classification is made up of legal categories. Its main purpose is to connect fact situations, things, acts or events with the legal rules that govern them. It is normative because how we frame legal categories affects the scope of the legal rules they contain, and how we combine them decides which rules will apply. A cognitive classification, however, is broader and more varied. It contains not only legal categories, but other legal or non-legal concepts. Its main purpose is to facilitate research and access to knowledge of and about the law.43 In Part A of this section, I will define legal categories and normative classifications. In Part B, I will outline the functions of both normative and cognitive classifications. 36 Thus, Kelsen found it necessary to deconstruct doctrinal categories before erecting his own theory of legal systems (ibid. at ch 27–33). See also Joseph Raz, Concept of a Legal System: An Introduction to the Theory of Legal System (Oxford: Clarendon, 1973) 114, 142ff; Michelle Cumyn, “Les catégories, la classification et la qualification juridiques : réflexions sur la systématicité du droit” (2011) 52 C de D 351; René Sève, “Système et code” (1986) 31 Archives de philosophie du droit 1 at 81. 37 Stephen A Smith, “Taking Law Seriously” (2000) 50 UTLJ 241 [Smith, “Taking Law Seriously”]; Pauline C Westerman, “Open or Autonomous? The Debate on Legal Methodology as a Reflection of the Debate on Law” in Mark van Hoecke, ed, Methodologies of Legal Research: Which Kind of Method for What Kind of Discipline? (Oxford: Hart, 2013) 87. For a more critical view of French legal scholarship, see Horatia Muir Watt, “The Epistemological Function of ‘la Doctrine”’ in Mark van Hoecke, ed, Methodologies of Legal Research: Which Kind of Method for What Kind of Discipline? (Oxford: Hart, 2013) 123. 38 See Joseph Raz, Ethics in the Public Domain: Essays in the Morality of Law and Politics, ch 11: “The Inner Logic of the Law” (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994). 39 Geoffrey Samuel, Epistemology and Method in Law (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2003) at 217–55; Karl Llewellyn, The Case Law System in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989) at 95–97; John Farrar, Introduction to Legal Method (Andover, UK: Sweet & Maxwell, 1977) at 42–4. 40 See e.g. Peter Birks, ed, English Private Law (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000); Peter Birks, ed, The Classification of Obligations (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997); Geoffrey Samuel, “Can Gaïus Really Be Compared to Darwin?” (2000) 49 ICLQ 297; Stephen Waddams, Dimensions of Private Law: Categories and Concepts in AngloAmerican Legal Reasoning (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2003); Jonnette Watson Hamilton, “Theories of Categorization: A Case Study of Cheques” (2002) 17 CJLS 115; Wendy Adams, “Determinate/Indeterminate Duality: The Necessity of a Temporal Dimension in Legal Classification” (2006) 44 Alta L Rev 403. 41 See e.g. Eleanor Rosch & Barbara B Lloyd, eds, Cognition and Categorization (Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1978); Edward E Smith & Douglas L Medin, Categories and Concepts (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1981); George Lakoff, Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal about the Mind (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987); Gregory L Murphy, The Big Book of Concepts (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 2004). 42 Steven Winter, A Clearing in the Forest: Law, Life, and Mind (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001); Anthony G Amsterdam & Jerome Bruner, Minding the Law (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2002); MarieClaude Prémont, Tropismes du droit : Logique métaphorique et logique métonymique du langage juridique (Montreal: Liber/Editions Thémis, 2003); Linda Hamilton Krieger, “The Content of Our Categories: A Cognitive Bias Approach to Discrimination and Equal Employment Opportunity” (1995) 47 Stan L Rev 1161. 43 Cognitive classifications may have indirect normative effect, because the ways in which they make information available influences the interpretation and evolution of legal norms.

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A. Legal Categories and Normative Classifications A legal category is defined as a grouping of similar or equivalent fact situations (objects or events) governed by a given legal regime (a set of legal rules). Legal categories possess both a factual dimension and a legal dimension, since their function is precisely to bind the two together. Legal categories play a fundamental role in legal reasoning, because it is by identifying an object or event to the relevant category that one determines which legal rules will apply, a process called ‘characterization’. Characterization has the same importance in law as diagnosis does in medicine. They are both instances of a more general cognitive process which psychologists refer to as categorization. All categories of objects or events used or defined by law do not form legal categories, according to the above definition. To qualify as such, a category of objects or events must be associated with a legal regime, i.e., a set of rules that govern the members of the category. Thus, for instance, a ‘vehicle’ is not a legal category, unless there can be said to exist a legal regime specifically applicable to vehicles. Not all legal concepts form legal categories either, for similar reasons. The concept of ‘duty’ is not a legal category, but ‘negligence’ is in the common law, and ‘civil liability’ in the civil law. Concepts that do not name legal categories do not form part of a normative classification. However, they may form part of a cognitive classification of legal knowledge. Thus one is likely to find entries for ‘duty’ and ‘vehicle’ in a legal dictionary, index or library catalogue. Every legal system possesses a number of different normative classifications within it. A given object or event may belong to several different legal categories. For example, a single act may give rise to criminal and civil liability. Moreover, it is impossible to arrange all legal categories within a single hierarchy. For example, there are several separate classifications of obligations and contracts. However, legal classifications are usually designed in such a way as to avoid the repetition of legal rules across categories. The preferred approach is to include such rules within a superordinate category (e.g., contract or crime). Normative legal classifications represent the ways in which rules interrelate. The rules within a legal category apply together to the objects or events of that category. Categories forming part of the same classification at a given level of generality are usually mutually exclusive (e.g., sale and lease), although overlapping categories sometimes occur as well. The categories from different classifications are connected to each other in certain ways. For example, categories of substantive law relate to categories of rules of evidence or procedure, which normally form separate classifications. Legal categories do not contain only fact situations on the one hand and legal rules on the other. They also contain principles and policy considerations (e.g., freedom of contract, the best interest of the child). In addition, legal scholars seldom limit themselves to citing rules and examples of objects or events when they write or teach on a given subject. The category also incorporates other relevant information about the objects of the category, the rules that apply to such objects and their relationships with other categories of the legal system. This might include fragments of legal history, comparative law, practice, philosophy, statistics, psychology, economics, etc.: precisely the sorts of knowledge Kelsen wished to exclude from his ‘Pure Theory’ of law.44 The reason why legal scholars include such knowledge in their representation of legal concepts is that they find it crucial to studying, interpreting or applying the law. It forms an integral part of jurists’ understanding of legal categories and the rules, principles and doctrines they contain.45 B. Functions of Normative and Cognitive Classifications Legal classifications mainly serve three functions. First, as mentioned, normative classifications play an essential role in legal reasoning. It is by characterizing an object or event that one determines which rules and principles apply to it. Characterization forms a necessary part of all legal decisions, yet it rarely receives the same attention as rule interpretation, and it is seldom the object of judicial discussion. There appear to be two reasons for this. The process of characterization usually takes place intuitively and within a matter of 44 Kelsen, supra note 7 at 1. 45 Hanoch Dagan, “Legal Realism and the Taxonomy of Private Law” in Charles Rickett & Ross Grantham, eds, Structure and Justification in Private Law: Essays for Peter Birks (Oxford: Hart, 2008).

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seconds.46 Moreover, characterization of an object or event is often uncontroversial: for the most part, there is agreement over the content of legal categories.47 Normative classifications also form the basis for deductive, inductive and analogical reasoning.48 They support the rule of law, which demands that like cases be treated alike.49 A second function of all legal classifications – normative and cognitive – is that they are crucial to our ability to acquire, retrieve and communicate knowledge of and about the law. Research in cognitive psychology has shown that individuals retain knowledge about the world in the form of structured, conceptbased understanding. Psychologists do not agree on the configuration of semantic memory, and the terms of their debate are relevant to law. One hypothesis is that it is set-based: the concepts in semantic memory are categories whose elements have certain attributes in common; the categories are used to store information about such elements. Concepts are arranged hierarchically where the more abstract and general ones include those that are narrower and more specific. Another hypothesis emphasizes the relations between concepts. Concepts are arranged in a network or web, and a variety of relations form between them, which are not limited to inclusion or exclusion. Information appears to be stored between concepts rather than within them.50 Research in this area has important implications for legal education. A third function of normative and cognitive classifications is that they are necessary for ordering and indexing written materials, in the form of paper or electronic documents. Classification and indexing systems make use alternatively or simultaneously of the hierarchy and the network or web as a means of ordering and searching for documents. The importance of classification and indexing systems was expressed eloquently by Justice Kasirer in his introductory essay to the work of McGill Librarian Lenore Rapkin: The content and form of the law library suggest that it is, in some measure, a representation of the legal order which it is designed to serve. Like the legal order itself, the law library is a human invention and a human construction; its way of carving up ideas is itself an idea-system for legal knowledge in the universe it defines. … One French scholar has wisely remarked that legal documentation reproduces the structure of the legal order and, as a matter of course, experts in legal library science have also developed parallel talents in legal methodology and bibliography. The LC subject-headings are indeed one place in which one might find the raw material for the lawyers’ existential question ‘What is law?’. Certainly the contents of a law library holds a message as to what belongs in the discipline, and law librarians are conscious of this dimension of their work.51

Naturally, the three functions just described are intertwined. One expects to find congruence in the choice and definition of concepts representing legal categories, whether they are used in the context of legal argument, teaching, writing or designing a classification or indexing system. Some non-legal concepts (such as ‘women’) and legal concepts that do not form legal categories (such as ‘reasonableness’) must find their way into an index applied to legal documents, as they become independent objects of study. The absence of ‘women’ in normative legal classifications is to be expected, since the law does not apply separately to men and to women; but that makes it difficult for feminist scholars to obtain the relevant legal materials in order to determine whether the law may in fact apply differently to women and to men. This example shows how cognitive 46 François Blanchard, “Vers une théorie de la qualification juridique : Les socles épistémiques de la catégorisation” in Danièle Bourcier & Pierre Mackay, eds, Lire le droit: langue, texte, cognition (Paris: LGDJ, 1992). 47 I do not mean to suggest that legal categories are natural or that they are capable of a precise definition; they are not. Some jurists seem to espouse this view, which is inherited from logical empiricism. For an interesting critique by cognitive scientists, see Lakoff, supra note 41 at ch 11; Murphy, supra note 41 at ch 2. 48 I am referring here to ordinary legal reasoning, not formal logic. See discussion at note 31, supra. 49 Stephen A Smith, “A Map of the Common Law?” (2004) 40 Can Bus LJ 364 at 366, 382. 50 See e.g. Allan M Collins & M Ross Quillian, “Retrieval Time from Semantic Memory” (1969) 8 Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior 240; Edward E Smith, Edward J Shoben & Lance J Rips, “Structure and Process in Semantic Memory: A Featural Model for Semantic Decisions” (1974) 81 Psychological Review 214; Endel Tulving, Elements of Episodic Memory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983). 51 Nicholas Kasirer, “‘K’ as a Structure of Anglo-American Legal Knowledge” (1997) 22 Can L L 159 at 160; Lenore Rapkin, A Civil Law Lexicon for Library Classification (Buffalo: WS Hein, 1998). The source referred to in the quotation is Yann Tanguy, La recherche documentaire en droit (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1991).

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classifications must be more developed and less rigid than normative classifications in order to reflect and facilitate a more critical brand of research that cuts across traditional legal boundaries.52

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IV. Conclusion Law professors know instinctively that they must think carefully about how they name, define and order legal categories in their teaching. A fine balance has to be found between innovation – reframing existing categories and rethinking the structure of the law – and compliance with convention – teaching definitions and classifications that are shared by the legal or broader community.53 Categories and classifications are not only used in legal reasoning, they are also tools for memorizing, retrieving and communicating knowledge about the law. While participants in the legal system often argue over rules and their interpretation, they generally agree on their approximate ‘location’ within the law. This gives them access to a shared repertory which forms the basis for meaningful argument. Legal categories and classifications are generally more stable than rules, but they adjust incrementally to changes in law and context. As Edward Levi has observed, ‘the classification changes as the classification is made’.54 A more radical departure from existing categories and classifications might become a necessity. It is perhaps surprising that law school curricula are still structured in good part using subjects that were defined in the nineteenth century.55 That raises an interesting question: how does one go about effecting such change? Despite its importance, legal systematization meets with hostility in some academic circles.56 One is suspected of formalism or conceptualism for engaging in it. This is a misconception induced by positivism. I hope to have shown in this chapter that systematization is an essential contribution of legal scholarship and that it is a normative and creative endeavour. In the last few centuries, the State has provided authoritative definitions and classifications of legal categories in the form of codes, legislation and judicial dicta, which have formed the basis for doctrinal systematization. In a Stateless legal system, doctrinal writers and law professors will simply play a more prominent role.

52 Louise Langevin & Valérie Bouchard, “Les grands arrêts sur les droits des femmes : projet et réflexions théoriques féministes” (2011) 52 C de D 551. 53 Roderick A Macdonald & Jason MacLean, “No Toilets in Park” (2005) 50 McGill LJ 721 at 759–62; in the present volume, Rosalie Jukier, “The Impact of ‘Stateless Law’ on Legal Pedagogy”, ch 16. 54 Edward H. Levi, An Introduction to Legal Reasoning (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1948) at 3. 55 Robert W Gordon, “The Geologic Strata of the Law School Curriculum” (2007) 60 Vand L Rev 339. 56 Smith, “Taking Law Seriously”, supra note 37 at 246.

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Part III The Forms and Aspirations of Stateless Law

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Chapter 8

Brève théorie culturelle du droit

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Louis Assier-Andrieu*

I. Introduction Depuis la célèbre formulation de Montesquieu dans L’esprit des lois selon laquelle « les lois sont … les rapports nécessaires qui dérivent de la nature des choses »,1 la science du droit chemine avec des degrés variables d’empathie envers les sciences humaines et sociales. Celles-ci sont nées pour l’essentiel à partir de la seconde moitié du XIXe siècle sinon dans la pensée des juristes, comme l’anthropologie sociale avec Henry Sumner Maine et Lewis Henry Morgan, du moins de la volonté de penser l’ordonnancement des rapports sociaux à l’exemple des façons dont le droit appréhende ces mêmes rapports. Max Weber parlera même de l’objet de la sociologie comme de l’observation « des régularités dotées de l’apparence des régularités juridiques » (« law-like regularities »).2 Pourquoi cette référence au droit pour penser le social? Elle tient, semble-t-il, à ce qu’avant d’être norme, le droit est lecture ou reflet de la vie sociale: il nomme et il dépeint les réalités qu’il a pour mission de règlementer. C’est, en retour, en vertu d’un principe analogique toujours actif que les réflexions sur la nature de la société, ses crises et ses transformations, menées par les sciences sociales, se sont inspirées des modèles fournis par la science juridique. Il n’y a pas d’anthropologie de la parenté – l’une des démarches les plus « scientifiques » des sciences humaines – sans l’application du comput romain de l’alliance et de la filiation.3 Mais cet inceste créateur possède un triple revers. D’abord il est difficile de retourner vers la discipline matricielle, qui fait, comme pensée ou comme doctrine, intrinsèquement partie de l’objet droit, les regards issus des disciplines subséquentes: la démarche analogique est un fusil à un coup et il est hasardeux de vouloir employer le concept sociologisé de « coutume » vers la société et vers le droit qui l’ont formulé à l’origine – la coutume n’a ni le même sens ni la même portée si elle est constatée par l’ethnologue ou attestée par le juriste.4 Le deuxième revers est moins franc. Depuis la sociological jurisprudence, le Droit libre et le Réalisme, la complexification de la société moderne a connu son pendant en droit par un appel de plus en plus insistant à la science sociale: pour administrer la complexité, il fallait d’abord la comprendre. Cela est vrai de tous les aspects du droit contemporain qui multiplient les appels aux sciences sociales, au pire considérées comme des « sciences auxiliaires » du droit, au mieux comme des partenaires sur un pied d’égalité – ce dernier point concerne surtout l’économie. Le problème qui se pose alors est celui de la capacité de ces sciences, inscrites dans une sorte de division du travail, de produire des savoirs qui soient affranchis de l’agenda juridique qui a été à l’origine de cette production, avec, à l’inverse, la perspective de subordonner l’œuvre du droit à une autre normativité, religieuse, économique ou politique. Un troisième revers concerne enfin la connaissance du droit, cet objet qui est à lui-même sa propre science, au moins en partie. Pour les raisons qui précèdent, il n’y a pas de posture externe ou interne dont l’une serait meilleure que l’autre, mais des enchevêtrements pluri ou inter disciplinaires de connaissances produites par des juristes, certes, mais aussi par des historiens, * Ce texte a été préparé durant un fellowship au Centre for Advanced Studies, Käte Hamburger Kolleg, Recht Als Kultur, de l’Université de Bonn (Allemagne) dont je tiens à remercier le directeur, Werner Gephart; merci aussi à Helge Dedek (McGill), Guillaume Tusseau (Sciences Po) et Mikhail Xifaras (Sciences Po) pour leurs précieux commentaires. 1 Montesquieu, De l’esprit des lois, L 1, ch 1, Amsterdam, 1748. 2 Max Rheinstein, dir, Max Weber on Law in Economy and Society, Cambridge (Mass), Harvard University Press, 1954 à la p 12. 3 Louis Assier-Andrieu, « L’anthropologie entre la négation et l’imitation du droit » dans Jacques Commaille, Laurence Dumoulin et Cécile Robert, dir, La juridicisation du politique, 2e éd, Paris, LGDJ, coll Droit et société, 2010, 97. 4 Louis Assier-Andrieu, « Penser le temps culturel du droit: Le destin du concept de coutume en anthropologie » (2001) 160 L’Homme. Revue française d’anthropologie 67. 1

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des sociologues, des anthropologues ou des économistes, parfois par des chercheurs cumulant plusieurs identités disciplinaires. La difficulté principale est ainsi de voir émerger des territoires de recherche authentiquement communs entre les sciences du droit et celles de la société. Comme la Révolution française a engendré l’histoire de Michelet et la sociologie de Comte pour comprendre les bouleversements accomplis et la nouvelle société, la mondialisation, réelle ou imaginée, sécrète l’exigence de penser globalement, c’est-à-dire de confronter les démarches classiques au nouvel horizon comparatif. C’est à cette aune que l’on peut envisager de façon critique deux concepts qui sont aussi de larges voies de recherche: le pluralisme juridique et le culturalisme juridique. On évoquera ces deux plates-formes de débat, en vigueur depuis plusieurs décennies et exposées à la nécessité de penser globalement, pour les confronter à leurs portées épistémologiques respectives – faut-il les relancer, les abandonner, les aménager? On utilisera comme guide d’analyse la fameuse thèse de Louis Dumont, ici sensiblement infléchie.5 Résumons donc ce propos hypothétique. Toute société humaine est faite d’individus liés entre eux par des relations collectives. La teneur de ces relations est qualifiée par une idéologie qui accorde une valeur plus ou moins importante aux deux polarités en jeu: l’individu et la communauté. Nulle société ne peut être totalement individualiste. Nulle société ne peut non plus être totalement collectiviste ou holiste. La propriété privée la plus absolue exige un rapport social qui l’autorise et qui la garantisse. La plus collectiviste des sociétés exige, elle, des protocoles d’individualisation pour que ses normes modèlent concrètement les conduites. Historiquement et anthropologiquement, on peut admettre que la plupart des sociétés procèdent de la combinaison idéologique de ces deux polarités opposées et indissociables dont l’une, holiste, englobe nécessairement l’autre, individualiste. Ce prisme semble convenir pour engager notre discussion car le pluralisme juridique suggère une individuation du sujet de droit, soumis à une variété d’injonctions normatives, parmi lesquelles in fine il peut avoir à choisir; ensuite car le culturalisme juridique, à l’inverse, met l’accent sur une idéologie de l’appartenance communautaire que la globalisation ne ferait que renforcer par réaction. Mais, bien sûr, les choses ne sont pas figées: l’individuation qui fait l’objet du pluralisme peut concerner une communauté et le holisme de la culture peut se trouver absorbé par les prérogatives individuelles, comme lorsqu’on parle de « culture des droits de l’homme ».6 Ajoutons que, distingués pour entrer en matière, ces deux modèles ne sont nullement équivalents sur le plan épistémologique et nous ne leur accorderons naturellement pas une importance égale. Le pluralisme provient, à l’origine, essentiellement de la volonté de penser la colonisation et les régimes post-coloniaux. Il est une théorie marquée par ses contextes initiateurs et surtout par son caractère étroitement lié à un artefact du droit en tant que pratique: comme avec « la coutume », qui lui permet de saisir les modes de vie paysans ou indigènes, l’avancement du droit dans les univers sociaux perçus comme « autres » suppose le recours à des catégories qui soient à la fois sociologiques et juridiques par le truchement desquelles l’œuvre de réglementation puisse s’anticiper et s’accomplir. Pour cette double raison, on ne l’évoquera que succinctement, malgré le moment de jouvence que semble lui conférer le « global turn »,7 soit la nécessité actuelle de penser globalement. Le mouvement qui existe autour de la culture juridique ou de la tradition juridique (qui n’est autre qu’une « culture dans le temps »)8 nous retiendra davantage. Si le pluralisme favorise les études empiriques sans hypothèse majeure sur la consociatio ou sociabilité humaine, autre que « tout est juridique », le culturalisme juridique se déploie sur de multiples terrains, selon diverses écoles et avec peut-être autant d’hypothèses sur la nature de cette consociatio. A chaque pas, c’est en outre le besoin, plus ou moins clairement pensé et exprimé, de renforcer la part holiste de l’idéologie qui s’y manifeste, comme si l’excroissance glorieuse de l’individualisme en tant que valeur dominante laissait entrevoir la possibilité du nihilisme, de l’absence 5 Voir notamment Louis Dumont, Essais sur l’individualisme: Une perspective anthropologique sur l’idéologie moderne, Paris, Seuil, 1983; Homo Aequalis II: L’idéologie allemande: France-Allemagne et retour, Paris, Gallimard, bibl des Sciences humaines, 1991. Sur la portée philosophique des premiers textes de Dumont sur la question, voir Alain Renaut, L’ère de l’individu: Contribution à une histoire de la subjectivité, Paris, Gallimard, bibl des Idées, 1989 aux pp 69–105. 6 Comme le fait Lawrence M Friedman dans son dernier livre, discuté plus loin: The Human Rights Culture: A Study in History and Context, New Orleans, Quid Pro Books, 2011 [Friedman, Human Rights Culture]. 7 Selon l’heureuse expression de Mikhail Xifaras. 8 Pierre Legrand, Le droit comparé, Paris, Presses Universitaires de France, 2011 à la p 10.

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annoncée de consociatio, faisant advenir un improbable univers ouvert composé d’individus absolus, dépourvus de liens les uns avec les autres. Ce propos ne s’articule nullement, sauf exception, sur des évocations empiriques, sur les apports nombreux et inestimables des chercheurs qui ont produit les matériaux sur lesquels il est aisé et certainement critiquable de généraliser. Il s’intéresse aux angles d’approche, aux épistémologies explicites ou implicites de ces deux mouvements fédérateurs et, comme on l’aura compris, à leur portée idéologique. Compte tenu d’une littérature pléthorique, on ne retiendra dans les limites de ce texte que quelques éléments, si possible de valeur exemplaire, en tâchant de compenser par la cohérence les lacunes de l’échantillon. Enfin tentera-t-on de proposer un rapide regard sur une contribution renouvelée du droit à la théorie sociale,9 pourvu que l’on accepte d’en mesurer une historicité ou une relativité occidentales, que caractérise notamment sa prétention à l’universalisme. A l’heure ou des normativités concurrentes, comme la religion ou l’économie, se proposent d’altérer où de soumettre la normativité juridique, il semble opportun de réexaminer certaines évidences conceptuelles et de les livrer au débat le plus large. II. Les impasses du pluralisme juridique « J’entends par “pluralisme juridique” la présence dans un champ social de plus d’un ordre juridique ». Ainsi s’exprimait le sociologue John Griffiths en commençant un long texte fondateur du mouvement pluraliste, actif depuis le début des années 1980 et notamment ordonné autour du Journal of African Law Studies devenu en 1981 Journal of Legal Pluralism auquel on ajouta plus tard « and Unofficial Law ».10 La thèse de Griffiths – qui circulait depuis plusieurs années avant sa publication comme un samizdat – s’appuie sur deux postulats. Le premier veut que le « droit étatique » (state law) ne soit pas l’auteur exclusif de l’ordre juridique, d’autres forces normatives y concourent, chacune selon le « champ social » dont elle émane. En cela, Griffiths reprend la théorie de Sally Falk Moore, selon laquelle le droit est la façon dont « un champ social semi-autonome » (semi-autonomous social field)11 produit ses moyens de régulation, avec pour résultat, chez Griffiths, « une hétérogénéité normative liée au fait que l’action sociale prend toujours place dans un contexte de “champs sociaux semi-autonomes” à la fois multiples et interpénétrés ».12 Il s’agit donc de décrire des situations de pluralisme juridique, pas vraiment d’établir des rapports de causalité: nous sommes dans un jeu horizontal où la diachronie n’a pas sa place, non plus que les spécifications géographiques – « le pluralisme juridique est un aspect universel de l’organisation sociale ».13 Dans une note finale, l’auteur livre ce constat éclairant: « tout contrôle social est plus ou moins “juridique” ».14 Un second postulat vient justifier le caractère novateur du propos, et sans doute le fut-il: « Le centralisme juridique est un mythe, un idéal, une prétention, une illusion ».15 La piste est importante: l’Etat législateur et juge produit ses propres conditions idéologiques d’approche et il est à même de les inculquer non seulement aux juristes mais aux chercheurs en sciences sociales qui en entreprennent l’étude. Elle ne fut que modérément suivie, sinon par la queue de comète du marxisme, et parfois avec talent.16 En revanche, pas plus que dans l’optique de Moore, nous n’avons de théorie des formations historiques et culturelles des « champs sociaux semi-autonomes », ni une réponse à la question qui s’impose: qu’est-ce qui distingue un ordre spécifiquement juridique des normes du contrôle social?

 9 Considérant l’apport de Roberto Mangabeira Unger comme une étape fondamentale dans ce sens: Law in Modern Society: Toward a Criticism of Social Theory, New York, Free Press, 1976. 10 John Griffiths, « What is Legal Pluralism? » (1986) 24 J Legal Pluralism 1. 11 Voir Sally Falk Moore, Law as Process: An Anthropological Approach, Londres, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978 aux pp 54–81. 12 Ibid. à la p 38. 13 Ibid. 14 Ibid. à la p 39 n 3. 15 Ibid. à la p 4. 16 Voir par ex Francis G Snyder, « Colonialism and Legal Form: The Creation of ‘Customary Law’ in Senegal » (1981) 19 J Legal Pluralism 49.

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En 1993, Brian Tamanaha dénoncera cet acte de « foi » qu’il existe quelque chose au-delà de ce qui est produit par la culture ou par le contexte.17 S’interrogeant déjà sur la fortune du pluralisme juridique malgré ses manquements conceptuels remarquables – une caricature formaliste et positiviste de l’Etat de droit et la dilution du juridique dans la norme sociale – Tamanaha y vit la conséquence de ce que les anthropologues juristes travaillant sur les sociétés post-coloniales, les plus enclins à le pratiquer, avaient peu d’appétit ou de compétences pour l’étude de l’Etat réel et surtout un intérêt corporatif à se maintenir sur le sous-champ constitutif de leur sous-discipline.18 Il est en outre plus aisé de considérer le pluralisme juridique avec des lunettes de juriste que de s’interroger sur les conditions d’apparition et d’affirmation de la catégorie du droit. Paradoxalement, le « pluralisme juridique » des origines est l’exact contrepoint du « centralisme juridique » qu’il condamne: une construction abstraite et volontaire qui installe l’opposition artificielle de deux pôles dont les fondements se dérobent à l’analyse. Il y a pourtant chez Griffiths, outre sa piste inaboutie sur le fétichisme de l’Etat, le germe d’un critère discriminant entre le droit et les autres formes d’organisation sociale. Il provient de sa lecture d’Eugen Ehrlich qui exhibe le socius fondamental de l’humain comme Genossenschaft, lequel peut prendre plusieurs formes encastrées les unes dans les autres (famille, communauté, ethnie …) et sécrète et garantit la variété des normativités, de l’étiquette à la mode et jusqu’aux « règles de décision », qui peuvent être considérées comme un critère discriminant de la juridicité. Mais Griffiths semble ne citer cette voie qu’à regret, comme la manifestation que toutes les règles se valent, qu’aucune ne prévaut par sa substance et que l’Etat est en concurrence avec tous les autres modes normatifs.19 Critique sévère du pluralisme juridique, notamment pour faillir à définir le droit, Tamanaha en propose néanmoins une version renouvelée récemment, propre, nous dit-il, à penser la globalisation. Abandonnant la théorie du contrôle social au « pluralisme normatif » (que sur le tard Griffiths accepte de promouvoir au détriment du « pluralisme juridique »20), il s’agit dès lors de « considérer comme le droit ce que les gens identifient et traitent comme “le droit” ».21 Un privilège est donné à la vision subjective des intéressés et d’autre part à la notion de « pratique sociale » qui dispense le chercheur de penser à l’avance ce qu’est le droit.22 La démarche est légitime et anticipe sur la praxéologie juridique récemment théorisée par Baudouin Dupret23 cette façon de fonder l’analyse avant tout sur la vision des acteurs. Elle ambitionne de substituer à la « pratique pluraliste courante d’étiqueter des ensembles de choses très différentes », la comparaison des diverses manières de concevoir le droit.24 Comme on le perçoit, cette volonté de « s’affranchir de toute présupposition sur la nature du droit »25 remplace, sur le fond, un pluralisme fondé sur une caricature de l’Etat de droit par un pluralisme qui lui aussi repose sur un préjugé juridique: celui de l’universalisme et du fameux adage romain ubi societas, ibi ius, cet outil supérieur d’assujettissement des pratiques et des cultures au prisme juridique. Plus récemment, Tamanaha prend à témoin l’Europe médiévale comme modèle d’un pluralisme dont le concept est mobilisé de nouveau.26 L’est-il utilement et y a-t-il véritablement pluralité de droits? Sur le plan formel, certainement: la ville, la corporation, la communauté d’habitants, et plus largement toutes les associations humaines sont régies par des privilèges particuliers ou des normes internes en même temps que par la loi du seigneur, celle du roi et celle de Rome. Cependant, il faut noter que l’Europe médiévale, unie par la Chrétienté, partage une même idée de la substance du droit: en dépit de la multiplicité des statuts, des sources 17 Brian Z Tamanaha, « The Folly of the ‘Social Scientific’ Concept of Legal Pluralism » (1993) 20:2 JL & Soc’y 192 à la p 201 [Tamanaha, « Folly »]. 18 Ibid. à la p 205. 19 Griffiths, supra note 10 aux pp 25–7. 20 Brian Z Tamanaha, « Understanding Legal Pluralism: Past to Present, Local to Global » (2008) 30 Sydney L Rev 375 à la p 395 [Tamanaha, « Understanding Legal Pluralism »]. 21 Brian Z Tamanaha, « A Non-Essentialist Version of Legal Pluralism » (2000) 27:2 JL & Soc’y 296 à la p 313 [Tamanaha, « Non-Essentialist »]. 22 Ibid. à la p 314. 23 Baudouin Dupret, Adjudication in Action: An Ethnomethodology of Law, Morality and Justice, Farnham (R-U), Ashgate, 2011. 24 Tamanaha, « Non-Essentialist », supra note 21 à la p 316. 25 Ibid. à la p 318. 26 Tamanaha, « Understanding Legal Pluralism », supra note 20 aux pp 377–81.

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de règles et des juridictions, elle est soudée par une conception sensiblement commune de l’ordre juridique comme bras armé de l’ordre cosmique.27 La pluralité des coutumes et des sources législatives (religieuses et séculières) est établie mais peut-on parler de pluralisme juridique devant une pareille unité sémantique? Dans la brillante articulation de son propos, Tamanaha met en outre à parité de statut épistémologique diverses formes de « communautés » que l’on peut, à l’inverse, tenir pour résolument étrangères les unes aux autres. En effet, peut-on également, comme le fait Tamanaha, mettre à parité de statut épistémologique dans la globalisation le renouveau et l’expansion de la charia, la norme économique, les communautés historiques et celles de l’Internet?28 Il n’y a guère, comme on l’a avancé plus haut, que du point de vue de l’individu que ces normes et entités sociales sont à égalité de traitement, comme des sources d’influence. Précisément du point de vue global, s’il est permis de l’adopter, nous avons une différentiation fondamentale entre la charia, norme religieuse valable pour la communauté des croyants, territoriale et diasporique, les nationalités plus ou moins autonomes ou les communautés d’habitants et les différentes « communautés » structurées de façons fluctuantes sur la toile, dont la pertinence repose in fine sur la primauté de l’ego. Reste enfin la norme économique du capitalisme libéral: les formes historiques ou religieuses d’association y résistent (voir la finance islamique) ou peuvent être mises en position d’y résister en raison de leur forte dimension holiste, tandis que les formes engendrées par la technique procèdent de l’individualisme et en accentuent l’influence. C’est dans l’optique d’une même mise à plat épistémologique des agencements normatifs, d’un même souci de les tenir à parité, sans hiérarchie ni différence de statut, que se situe le « Global Legal Pluralism » du juriste comparatiste Paul Schiff Berman.29 Conformément à l’idéologie pluraliste de la globalisation, peu d’attention est donnée aux structures sociales héritées et naturellement à l’Etat-nation qui ne survit que par pacte avec les autres Etats-nations dans la perspective d’un « droit mondial ». Détachée de l’histoire, la pensée de Paul Berman promeut la normativité nouvelle comme « l’échange “jurisgénératif” de multiples communautés et de multiples engagements normatifs ».30 Ici aussi, puisque l’idée culturaliste ou multiculturaliste est explicitement rejetée, tout repose sur la définition de ces fameuses « communautés ».31 Il s’agit, nous diton, des affiliations politiques (Etats, villes, pays) et des affiliations proprement communautaires de type ethnique ou religieux mais on y ajoute « la myriade des “communautés génératrices de normes” comme les organisations commerciales, les syndicats et bien sûr les communautés de l’Internet ainsi que les effets normatifs du sentiment de culpabilité ou du sens du devoir. »32 Victime de la même confusion entre formes individualistes et formes holistes que chez Tamanaha, cette approche se présente comme une « voie intermédiaire » entre territorialité et universalisme, une voie qui exclut toute définition « essentialiste » du droit.33 A nouveau, le sujet est individualisé et l’idéologie ne cache pas son jeu. Chaque communauté, historique ou nouvelle, est chargée de « négocier son hybridité » et l’attention du chercheur doit se porter sur « les processus par lesquels les décalages normatifs peuvent être comblés, des espaces sociaux de partage peuvent être créés et par lesquels les ennemis peuvent devenir des adversaires ».34 La communauté « jurisgénératrice » ne produit des normes que pour contribuer au marché global de l’échange normatif. Outre le fait que, conformément à la tradition pluraliste, le droit se dissolve dans la norme sociale, il est produit et échangé. Il vient du bas pour accomplir un parcours horizontal de négociation et de partage avec cet horizon (commun avec certains culturalismes) d’un « idéal de tolérance, de dialogue et de complaisance mutuelle dans nos institutions juridictionnelles et régulatrices ».35

27 Voir Aaron J Gourevitch, Les catégories de la culture médiévale, Paris, Gallimard, bibl des Histoires, 1983 aux pp 155–212. 28 Tamanaha, « Understanding Legal Pluralism », supra note 20 aux pp 397–9. 29 Paul Schiff Berman, « Global Legal Pluralism » (2006–07) 80 S Cal L Rev 1155. 30 Ibid. à la p 1156. 31 Ibid. à la p 1168 n 49. 32 Ibid. aux pp 1170–73. 33 Ibid. à la p 1195. 34 Ibid. à la p 1235. 35 Ibid. à la p 1237.

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La vertu socialement structurante d’un droit qui, comme chez Pierre Legendre, serve de référence à la programmation historique d’un peuple est ignorée.36 La territorialité est synonyme d’obsolescence et la hiérarchie d’inconvenance. L’idée séduisante des « communautés jurisgénératrices » concerne à vrai dire plus la sociabilité de l’Internet qu’une authentique exploration de la genèse du droit, plus l’assemblée spontanée des techniciens d’élite qui norment la toile depuis 1992 que les communautés traditionnelles. L’idée séduisante des « communautés jurisgénératrices » semble plus concerner à vrai dire la sociabilité sur l’Internet qu’une authentique exploration de la genèse du droit. Comme avec l’ensemble de la pensée pluraliste, nous sommes moins dans le droit que dans le non-droit ou, selon le mot de Llewellyn, nous sommes dans « la machinerie ordinaire qui sert à régler des cas dans la société, cette machinerie qui ne dispose pas de dents pour y donner prise ».37 L’universalisme phénoménologique dont procède le pluralisme juridique repose, comme l’a bien vu Tamanaha, sur la doctrine de l’équivalence planétaire des formes juridiques formulée par Malinowski.38 Considérons ce fait un instant car il s’agit de faire jouer à l’anthropologie son rôle de preuve par l’extrême, par le primitif dont, du même mouvement, on cautionne l’éloignement. En 1926, dans Crime and Custom in Savage Society, Malinowski affirmait sur la foi de ses travaux sur la réciprocité en Mélanésie, que le droit est la configuration « des obligations d’une personne et des aspirations légitimes d’une autre ».39 C’est la source que l’on cite généralement quand on convie Malinowski à la théorie du droit. Mais ce fut en 1934, dans un texte moins connu, qu’il délivra les mobiles et la portée de sa pensée universaliste. La tâche de l’anthropologue, écritil, est « de traduire les principes du droit coutumier primitif dans nos institutions administratives modernes » car il n’existe « aucune rupture de continuité entre notre propre société et celle des peuples primitifs ».40 On traitera plus bas du sens théorique de la prétention à l’universalité du droit, restons-en pour le moment au contexte de ce propos. Malinowski, et avec lui toute l’anthropologie fonctionnaliste, est animé par le désir de légitimer et de fabriquer la fusion du droit primitif dans le droit moderne, ce qui selon lui doit être l’un des buts de l’œuvre coloniale.41 Cette vision a engendré, semble-t-il, la veine dominante de l’anthropologie juridique (legal anthropology) qui consiste à trouver en miroir chez les « autres » les phénomènes, principes et conceptions qui forment le droit et la pensée juridique dans les sociétés productrices d’anthropologues. Cette injonction d’analogie, qui va du civilisé au primitif et, horizontalement chez les pluralistes, du juridique au social, a eu pour mobile initial, sinon pour raison théorique, une injonction juridictionnelle de la Haute Cour impériale britannique en 1919 « d’étudier et comprendre » les coutumes indigènes pour les mieux concilier avec les dispositions de « notre droit ».42 Il est certes vain de confiner une pensée au cercle étroit de son origine. Il n’est pas moins hasardeux de perdre la mémoire de cette origine et de tenir pour vérité absolue une spéculation née d’un contexte précis. Le pluralisme d’origine malinowskienne a historiquement – du moins est-ce ainsi que l’on peut l’envisager – permis de penser ensemble et dans une certaine mesure d’unifier tradition occidentale et conceptions des pays conquis ou colonisés. Dans cet effort de synthèse, on a soutenu l’équivalence de l’autre et de soi sous l’égide du droit, voire plus tard de la suprématie de l’autre sur soi, par culpabilité impériale ou épuisement. Retenons néanmoins deux éléments. D’abord, la gestion intellectuelle des peuples tenus pour autres a permis de renforcer, par la preuve par l’extrême, le cas-limite, les conceptions domestiques des sociétés impériales en les validant à titre universel. C’est ce que le passage par Malinowski a permis de faire. La seconde dimension est l’effet de la première. Comment se fait-il que les revendications autochtones soient astreintes à un registre juridique d’expression au risque de transfigurer les conceptions autochtones elles-mêmes au nom desquelles 36 Voir Pierre Legendre, Leçons VI. Les enfants du texte: Etude sur la fonction parentale des Etats, Paris, Fayard, 1992. 37 Karl N Llewellyn, The Bramble Bush: The Classic Lectures on the Law and Law Schools, 11e éd, New York, Oxford University Press, 2004 à la p 58. 38 Tamanaha, « Folly », supra note 17 à la p 203. 39 Bronislaw Malinowski, Crime and Custom in Savage Society, Londres, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1926 à la p 55. 40 Bronislaw Malinowski, « Introduction » dans HI Hogbin, dir, Law and Order in Polynesia: A Study of Primitive Legal Institutions, Londres, Christophers, 1934, xvii à la p xxx. 41 Bronislaw Malinowski, « The Rationalization of Anthropology and Administration » (1930) 3:4 Africa 405. 42 Louis Assier-Andrieu, L’autorité du passé: Essai anthropologique sur la Common Law, Paris, Dalloz, coll Les sens du droit, 2011 aux pp 168–86.

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elles sont formulées? Pourquoi utiliser le langage du dominant, qui mutile ou anéantit le vernaculaire indigène? Ici nous touchons les modalités d’obtention de « l’aveu indigène », c’est-à-dire les mécanismes incitatifs du consentement des dominés à leur propre domination qui consiste en l’adoption du registre juridique pour la formulation de revendications forcément insatisfaites puisque la première d’entre elles – qu’il en soit fait comme avant le contact impérial – ne peut être satisfaite. Au-delà, et les scientifiques du pluralisme ont pu y contribuer nolens volens, le processus se parfait quand les concepts juridiques de l’Occident apparaissent dotés de la force culturelle de concepts autochtones, par la vertu de l’universalisme juridique. Comme l’écrit Mebenga de l’enseignement du droit en Afrique, « dans le monde universitaire, nombre d’enseignants restent encore séduits par la tentation de l’Occident et inaptes à procéder à une décolonisation mentale ».43 Par-delà les transferts ou transplants de droits, l’indigénisation de concepts allogènes, et par conséquent l’oblitération des conceptions indigènes elles-mêmes, bouclent le cycle colonial au point d’en freiner une étude que l’on ne saurait abandonner aux seules émotions moralisantes. III. L’arc des culturalismes Le pluralisme juridique, malgré son ouverture ontologique aux sciences sociales, ne trouve guère de terrain empirique qu’en tant que « pluralisme normatif », c’est-à-dire le domaine entier de la sociologie, même s’il semble s’être « restreint » à être l’un des grands courants des socio-legal studies, avec quelques incursions dans le domaine du droit comparé de la globalisation, à qui il fournit un modèle universalisant. A peu près contemporain dans l’histoire récente des sciences du droit, le concept de « culture juridique » embrasse un ensemble indéfini d’intelligences qui ne se trouvent pas fédérées, comme c’est le cas avec le pluralisme, par un organe tel que le Journal of Legal Pluralism. Comme l’écrit Sally Falk Moore, parmi de nombreux auteurs, la culture est « simplement un label apposé sur des coutumes durables, des idées, des valeurs, des habitudes et des pratiques ».44 Nous n’entrerons que modérément dans l’histoire du concept de culture45 pour aborder d’emblée l’idée de « culture juridique » qui oppose à l’influence décroissante du pluralisme un caractère fédérateur et authentiquement transdisciplinaire, malgré ou à cause des contours flous de sa composition.46 Fixons les idées avant d’en débattre. La notion de culture possède à mon sens quatre propriétés majeures: elle revendique une série de valeurs collectives déclinées en ordre hiérarchique et constitutives d’une idéologie; elle valorise la transmission de ces valeurs; elle sert de repère à l’identification d’un groupe social, qui partage les mêmes représentations, pour ses membres et envers les autres; enfin elle se dote des moyens de demeurer relativement inaccessible à la transformation par acte conscient de volonté. On confond parfois culture et tradition en prenant la partie, la transmission, pour le tout. Nous y reviendrons. L’idée a une histoire longue, qui croise le monde du droit, et une histoire courte, qui s’y résout. Dans ces deux histoires l’élément holiste l’emporte sur l’élément individualiste, jusqu’à même souvent n’appréhender l’être humain que comme le véhicule ou le témoin de la culture à laquelle il appartient. A l’autre extrémité, on trouve le butoir herdérien de cultures monades, singulières, irréductibles et récurrentes par essence.47 Les hiérarchiser – comme on le fit en qualifiant 43 Mathieu Mebenga, « Le droit et ses pratiques: expérience camerounaise » dans C Kuyu Mwissa, dir, Repenser les droits africains pour le XXIe siècle, Yaoundé, Menaibuc, 2001, 69 à la p 74, tel que cité dans Mark van Hoecke, « Family Law Transfers from Europe to Africa: Lessons for the Methodology of Comparative Legal Research » dans J Gillespie et P Nicholson, dir, Law and Development and the Global Discourses of Legal Transfers, Cambridge (R-U), Cambridge University Press, 2012, 279 [Van Hoecke, « Family Law Transfers »]. 44 Sally Falk Moore, « Certainties Undone: Fifty Turbulent Years of Legal Anthropology, 1949–1999 » dans SF Moore, dir, Law and Anthropology: A Reader, Malden (Mass), Blackwell, 2006, 346 à la p 347. 45 On se reportera à la thèse de Philippe Bénéton, Histoires de mots: culture et civilisation, Paris, Presses de la Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques, 1975 et à l’ouvrage de Denys Cuche, La notion de culture dans les sciences sociales, 4e éd, Paris, La Découverte, 2010. 46 Le Dictionnaire de la culture juridique (par S Rials et D Alland, dir, Paris, Presses Universitaires de France, 2003) ne comporte pas d’entrée « culture juridique ». 47 La philosophie de Johann Gottfried Herder mériterait de longs développements pour avoir posé les fondements mêmes de l’anthropologie culturelle. On peut se reporter à son texte majeur, Une autre philosophie de l’histoire (1774) (par

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certaines de « civilisations » et les autres de simples cultures – expose à l’ethnocentrisme. Les tenir pour universellement équivalentes – nulle d’entre elles ne saurait être « barbare » – expose au relativisme culturel. A. Le concept de culture

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Une définition large de la culture – définition canonique en sciences sociales – fut proposée en 1871 par Edward Burnett Tylor au début de sa Primitive Culture, une entreprise de synthèse de « la civilisation des tribus inférieures en relation à la civilisation des plus hautes nations ». Il la formule ainsi: La culture … prise dans son sens ethnographique le plus large est ce tout complexe qui inclut le savoir, la croyance, l’art, la morale, le droit, la coutume et tous les autres accomplissements et habitudes acquis par l’homme en tant que membre de la société.48

Ainsi, sous cette acception, la culture englobe-t-elle la société et ses pratiques, ses représentations et ses mœurs, son droit et sa « coutume ». Nul sous-champ particulier n’est spécifié, en ces premiers temps de l’anthropologie scientifique, car l’important est de rendre compte par tous moyens de la nature sociale du genre humain et de ses évolutions, de son unité et de ses différentiations. De nos jours le terme de culture s’applique à une infinité de particularismes, réels ou souhaités, de la culture d’entreprise aux cultures policières et urbaines, mais il reste empreint, souvent de façon diffuse, de sa connotation de singularité et d’indisponibilité, d’identité et de tradition. Héritière de Herder, c’est sans doute l’Ecole historique allemande, avec la philologie de Jakob Grimm et plus assurément l’historicisme juridique de Friedrich Carl von Savigny, qui semble avoir semé le grain moissonné plus tard par les anthropologues, même si le vocable « culture » est pour l’instant absent du vocabulaire. Savigny emploie le terme de « conscience commune du peuple » et inscrit dès l’origine sa pensée dans la recherche d’une phylogenèse du droit.49 Ecoutons-le, en 1814: [L]e droit civil présente un caractère déterminé propre à chaque peuple, comme le sont sa langue, ses mœurs, sa constitution. A vrai dire, ces phénomènes n’ont pas d’existence à part; ce ne sont que les diverses forces et activités du peuple considéré … Avec l’essor de la civilisation … toutes les activités du peuple se différencient toujours davantage, et ce qui était d’ordinaire l’affaire de tous échoit maintenant à des ordres distincts. C’est comme un ordre à part qu’apparaissent dès lors les juristes … [D]e même qu’auparavant le droit subsistait dans la conscience du peuple tout entier, de même il devient maintenant l’affaire de la conscience des juristes …

Dès lors, le droit mène une « double vie »: d’une part, comme partie de la totalité de la vie d’un peuple – ce qu’il ne cesse pas d’être – d’autre part, comme science spécifique entre les mains des juristes.50 Savigny décrit l’évolution qu’il connaît le mieux, celle de l’Europe occidentale, mais il propose une épure de valeur universelle. Si, à l’origine, le droit fait partie, comme la langue etc., de la « conscience commune du peuple » et qu’il en soit « le propre », c’est-à-dire une faculté qui le distingue des autres peuples, il devient clair qu’à la diversité des langues peut correspondre une diversité des droits dont l’occurrence est, comme celle du langage, universelle. Ensuite – une idée diversement interprétée depuis lors – Savigny nous parle du passage d’un état où toutes les fonctions sociales sont contenues dans la « conscience commune » à un état où ces fonctions deviennent spécifiées et des spécialistes affectés pour y veiller. C’est ainsi qu’apparaissent les juristes, artisans de ce que Savigny nomme le « droit technique », un droit écrit, formel, institutionnel. Mais, précise-t-il, le droit n’est jamais uniquement affaire de spécialistes, il n’est jamais uniquement technique. Cet Max Rouché, dir, Aubier, Paris, 1964) et à la biographie intellectuelle de Pierre Pénisson, JG Herder: La raison dans les peuples, Paris, Cerf, 1992. 48 Edward Burnett Tylor, Primitive Culture: Researches into the Development of Mythology, Philosophy, Religion, Art and Custom, vol 1, Londres, Murray, 1871 à la p 1. 49 Voir sur la philosophie de Savigny, Olivier Jouanjan, Une histoire de la pensée juridique allemande (1800–1918), Paris, Presses Universitaires de France, coll Léviathan, 2006 aux pp 26–33. 50 Friedrich Carl von Savigny, De la vocation de notre temps pour la législation et la science du droit, par Alfred Dufour, Paris, Presses Universitaires de France, coll Léviathan, 2006 aux pp 53–6.

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autre droit, qui survit dans la conscience commune, cohabite avec le droit technique comme « droit politique » et il lui est même supérieur car « moins artificiel » et partie intégrante de l’identité populaire. Nous avons donc trois éléments majeurs dans l’héritage de Savigny, qui établit ce qui deviendra l’idée de culture. Il y a d’abord l’idée de fusion originelle dans la culture des éléments qui en forment les attributs.51 Ensuite celle d’une spécification de l’attribut juridique, d’un détachement relatif de la matrice originelle. La troisième idée intéresse enfin la relation du droit spécifié avec le droit d’origine, inscrit dans la conscience commune et qui, avec elle, poursuit sa course. Ici Savigny installe une distinction de valeur: le « droit technique », déconnecté du bain d’origine, est empreint d’artificialité tandis que le « droit politique » procède, lui, de l’identité profonde et authentique du peuple considéré. Certes, la pensée de Savigny est tributaire du romantisme qui l’a inspirée, du moins pour ce texte de 1814, au reflux de l’influence française et dans le contexte de l’affirmation des valeurs germaniques.52 Mais on ne peut en négliger la considérable portée, même si, comme il en va parfois en sciences humaines, les dettes intellectuelles ne sont que rarement retracées et acquittées.53 Le premier point, l’indifférenciation, établit l’universalité anthropologique du droit comme phénomène de culture, c’est-à-dire comme propriété de toute communauté humaine, plus d’un siècle avant que Malinowski ne manifeste sa théorie de l’équivalence analogique suscitée, comme on l’a vu, par un événement juridictionnel, donc « technique », britannique. Avec la deuxième idée, la spécification, nous quittons le territoire toujours mouvant des origines – que nos contemporains répugnent à évoquer par crainte d’essentialisme – pour une phase proprement historique. Les processus de sécularisation des normes procèdent (la catégorie religieuse étant élastique) du passage du religieux au juridique et concernent, mieux qu’un mythique moment fondateur de partition, les multiples transitions du divin au temporel voire, comme il en va de certains pays islamiques, de redivinisation de la norme de droit.54 Enfin, quelle est la portée de la coexistence du « droit politique » et du « droit technique », et de l’ascendant du premier sur le second? Il y a là, semble-t-il, le ressort ou tout au moins le prélude de la démarche sociologique qui loge la vérité du droit dans le « droit vivant » ou dans « l’expérience juridique », un droit détaché de ses visages institutionnels.55 C’est l’antécédent, bien sûr aussi, de la démarche de Lawrence Friedman dite de la gap research (recherche sur le décalage) où le chercheur étudie la différence qui existe entre« le droit dans les textes » et« le droit dans la réalité des rapports sociaux », une thématique, nous y reviendrons, qui anime une grande partie des usagers du concept de « culture juridique ».56 Si la cohérence des problématiques de la « culture juridique » trouve sa plénitude dans la pensée de Savigny, relancée et généralisée par Tylor, la fortune du concept semble au moins en partie tenir à une certaine lassitude des chercheurs envers le droit comparé classique, avec le désir d’en renouveler les protocoles au risque d’en oublier jusqu’au nom. On examinera succinctement ci-après certaines reformulations, délibérées ou pas, des concepts savigniens touchant à l’identité juridique avant d’envisager le modèle de Friedman proprement dit pour ensuite évoquer l’emploi du concept de culture juridique par le droit comparé, notamment par le constitutionnalisme, avec pour effet de réaffirmer le contenu holiste de cette idée travaillée par les assauts d’un individualisme qui semble culminer, en droit pénal, avec la montée en puissance de l’« excuse culturelle ». 51 On trouve dans trop peu de travaux sur l’Europe occidentale l’étude des concepts globaux que la modernité a démantelés en diverses spécialités. Il en va ainsi du concept médiéval de « beauté » ou d’« art » qui intéresse la quête de perfection dans toute activité physique ou intellectuelle de l’artiste, de l’artisan et bien sûr du juriste; voir Helge Dedek, « The Splendour of Form: Scholastic Jurisprudence and ‘Formal Rationality’ » (2011) 5:2 Law and Humanities 349 à la p 365. 52 Outre Olivier Jouanjan, supra note 49, voir notamment Friedrich Engel-Janossi, The Growth of German Historicism, Baltimore, Johns Hopkins Press, 1944. 53 Pour une approche originale de la part « cosmopolite » de la pensée de Savigny, voir Helge Dedek, « When the Law Became ‘Cultivated’: European Legal Culture between ‘Kultur’ and Civilization » dans G Helleringer & K Purnhagen, dir, Towards a European Legal Culture, Oxford, Hart, 2014, 351. 54 Voir, pour l’Indonésie, Ayang Utriza, « La transformation du droit musulman en droit positif de l’Etat indonésien » dans Baudouin Dupret, dir, La charia aujourd’hui: Usages de la référence au droit islamique, Paris, La Découverte, 2012, 199. 55 Georges Gurvitch, L’expérience juridique et la philosophie pluraliste du droit, Paris, Pedone, 1935; Max Travers, Understanding Law and Society, Oxon, Routledge, 2010 aux pp 33–6. 56 C’est, semble-t-il, Roscoe Pound qui, parallèlement au mouvement allemand du Droit libre, a formulé le premier cet agenda scientifique (« Law in Books and Law in Action » (1910) 44 American Law Review 12). Sur la gap research de Friedman, voir B Garth, « Law and Society » dans S Katz, dir, The Oxford International Encyclopedia of Legal History, vol 4, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2009, 33.

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B. Sensibilités juridiques et conscience juridique classique Quand, en 1981, l’anthropologue Clifford Geertz fut invité à prononcer les Storrs Lectures à Yale Law School, le premier non juriste à avoir eu semble-t-il cet honneur, il s’attacha à évoquer les conceptions juridiques que lui avait fait fréquenter son parcours d’anthropologue: le haqq islamique, le dharma indien et le adat malaisien.57 Pour cet « anti-anti-relativiste », persuadé que « rares sont les conceptions qui échappent à la culture »,58 ce fut un défi que d’entreprendre une théorie de la comparaison des « traditions juridiques ». C’est, nous dit-il, par l’idée de « sensibilité juridique » (legal sensibility) qu’il est possible d’accéder à ce « sens déterminé de la justice » qui autorise de « parler des fondements culturels du droit de façon comparative ».59 Il s’appuie sur une phénoménologie et règle par là (pour lui) le problème de l’universel et du relatif: une sensibilité juridique est une manière de « représenter des événements sous une forme justiciable » et le droit n’est dès lors qu’une « façon distinctive d’imaginer le réel ».60 Ainsi, pour le fondateur de l’anthropologie interprétative, le droit est avant tout imagination, représentation, idéologie, mais il prend une forme « historiquement tenace ». Les sensibilités juridiques ne se laissent pas aisément altérer car elles possèdent un enracinement local: « le droit est un savoir local, pas un principe sans territoire ».61 C’est dans le détail des sensibilités territorialisées qu’il observe au Maroc, à Bali et à Java, et qu’il nous livre, que l’on peut interroger le véritable sens de la comparaison. Nous prendrons appui, pour ce faire, sur le célèbre principe de méthode énoncé par Franz Boas, digne héritier de l’école géographique allemande: « Nous devons veiller à ce que la comparaison soit réservée à ceux-là des phénomènes dont on aura prouvé qu’ils sont les effets des mêmes causes ».62 L’effet juridictionnel existe dans les trois cultures concernées, auxquelles il faut ajouter la culture juridique américaine qui sert de référence implicite à Geertz – aurait-il choisi de se focaliser sur le judiciaire s’il provenait d’une culture civiliste? Mais cet effet dérive-t-il partout du même ordre de causes? Le droit américain sacralise le juge mais le juge est un laïc, pas un clerc, et la norme est légale, pas divine. Le concept d’adat, à Java, est « un pot-pourri de règles vernaculaires pour la plupart non écrites » que les juristes coloniaux ont rationalisé (adatrecht) à partir d’usages villageois pour faire place à une tradition consensuelle de règlement des différends, à grands coups d’échanges de proverbes et selon l’étiquette.63 Le droit est donc, sous ce jour, une version populaire de la distinction du vice et de la vertu, déclinée selon le rang de chacun dans la hiérarchie sociale, et cette version populaire est relue et canalisée par effort colonial de rationalisation. Le concept indien et bouddhiste de dharma participe d’une « doctrine cosmique du devoir par laquelle chaque sorte d’être dans l’univers … possède … une éthique à accomplir et une nature à exprimer – les deux étant indifférenciés ».64 Dans la « sensibilité juridique indienne », « le droit subjectif et l’obligation sont vus comme dépendants de la position dans l’ordre social et la position dans l’ordre social est définie par la transcendance ».65 Si droit et statut découlent de l’ordre cosmique, quel est l’espace intellectuel ouvert à une « sensibilité » collective qui soit proprement juridique? Ecartée par Geertz dans son évocation de l’adat, la dimension islamique recouvre en revanche sa lecture du concept de haqq, tel qu’il l’a rencontré au Maroc. Le terme est l’un des noms du divin et il est hautement polysémique: réalité, vérité, justice, droit, devoir. C’est une conception par laquelle « le normatif et le véritable sont ontologiquement indissociables »,66 ce qui explique que le parjure soit avant tout un sacrilège que punit la damnation. Au-delà, notamment par l’institution de la preuve testimoniale

57 Clifford Geertz, « Fact and Law in Comparative Perspective » dans Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretive Anthropology, New York, Basic Books, 1983, 167 [Geertz, « Fact and Law »]. 58 Clifford Geertz, Available Light: Anthropological Reflections on Philosophical Topics, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2000 à la p 51. 59 Geertz, « Fact and Law », supra note 57 à la p 175. 60 Ibid. à la p 184. 61 Ibid. à la p 208. 62 Franz Boas, « The Limitations of the Comparative Method in Anthropology » dans Race, Language and Culture, New York, Free Press, 1968, 275. 63 Geertz, « Fact and Law », supra note 57 aux pp 208–12. 64 Ibid. à la p 196. 65 Ibid. à la p 197. 66 Ibid. à la p 192.

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normative par elle-même, la culture du haqq s’est attachée à confondre le droit et le fait tandis que « la tradition occidentale » a fait le chemin inverse dans le sens d’une séparation rigoureuse.67 Avec ces trois exemples, et ce texte de Geertz qui a fait à sa manière jurisprudence (en devenant l’un des textes classiques de l’anthropologie juridique), nous avons affaire à un concept sécularisé par l’action des colonisateurs (adat) et deux concepts dépourvus de sécularité (dharma et haqq). On ne discutera pas ici de la pertinence de ces choix et de la teneur réelle des concepts dans les cultures concernées, que l’anthropologue semble tenir à l’écart du mouvement historique. Voyons-en la signification pour la comparaison revendiquée entre des cultures nommées « sensibilités ». Sommes-nous dans une situation analogue à celle que nous avons vue avec le « pluralisme juridique », une situation où la qualification de « juridiques » des sensibilités culturelles en question s’avèrerait dépourvue d’autre sens que celui, trop traditionnel en anthropologie, de faire ressortir des différences par effet d’exotisme? Présente en toile de fond dans la démonstration, la conception occidentale ou américaine du droit n’est-elle pas l’axe unique autour duquel pivotent les éléments de la comparaison dont la valeur est en proportion de l’éloignement? Geertz prévient la critique en minorant l’importance de « la question de savoir si les styles de jugement qui s’articulent sur les Anschauungen projetés par haqq, dharma et adat peuvent être ou non proprement qualifiés de “juridiques” ».68 Mais la critique s’impose, pour prévenir à son tour la confusion. L’ambition comparative traverse les sciences sociales et les sciences du droit. Comment se priver d’une démarche aussi précieuse que celle d’étudier, comme nous y incitait Savigny, la spécification ou non du juridique à partir de cosmogonies réputées fondatrices ou de croyances dans les vertus transcendantales de la norme divine? C’est d’un concept ferme de ce qui est juridique et de ce qui ne l’est que par assignation d’identité, coloniale, post-coloniale ou académique, que peuvent se nourrir les approches comparatives, non pas de digressions métaphoriques qui célèbrent l’empire du droit à défaut de l’étudier. Dans la ligne de la pensée savignienne, même si le maître allemand ne figure pas explicitement dans son texte, on doit évoquer pour son approche du « droit technique », la vision de Duncan Kennedy de « la pensée juridique classique ».69 Pourquoi l’associer à Savigny? Parce que l’animateur fondateur des Critical Legal Studies fait appel à l’idée de « conscience juridique » (legal consciousness) pour structurer son propos. La « pensée juridique » selon Kennedy est celle d’une « élite juridique d’auteurs de traités, de leaders du barreau et de juges de la Cour suprême », les trois agissant, c’est implicite, aux Etats-Unis. Cette pensée est unifiée en ce qu’elle« transcende les querelles d’écoles » et qu’elle « s’allie à la science contre les clivages philosophiques et ceux de la politique ».70 La « conscience juridique » est la source et la structure sous-jacente de cette pensée, démultipliée en sous-systèmes porteurs de sens. On négligera ici le schéma structuraliste auquel s’attache Kennedy pour prêter attention au couteau sémantique du « tout social » en cause. Il s’agit d’une « entité dotée d’une certaine autonomie … et d’une série de concepts et d’aspirations intellectuelles, qui évolue selon un mode propre et exerce une influence … distincte de celles qu’exercent le pouvoir politique et l’intérêt économique ».71 Le groupe considéré, l’élite nationale du monde du droit, est ainsi crédité de la faculté d’incarner le droit, jusqu’à même partager non seulement une conscience commune mais un inconscient commun: « Ils peuvent partager les attributs des aspects majeurs de l’ordre juridique, des aspects si fondamentaux qu’ils ne viennent jamais ou rarement consciemment à l’esprit des acteurs ».72 Nous sommes sur le terrain du droit savant incarné par une caste de spécialistes, mais ceux-ci, détachés de l’intérêt économique et du pouvoir politique, sont crédités d’une faculté de produire ou de receler la culture juridique analogue à celle dont Savigny créditait « le peuple » dans son modèle d’ensemble. Séparée de la genèse de ses contenus – le structuralisme s’intéresse structurellement peu à la genèse des idées – la « conscience » exprimée par les spécialistes, délégués pour assumer la fonction juridique dans le corps social, constitue, par l’effet de cette délégation, une forme holiste de gestion communautaire de symboles et de normes qui ne deviennent individuels que par leur concrétisation pour régler le sort de tel ou tel justiciable. Certes, pour Kennedy, les significations portées par la structure subissent 67 Ibid. à la p 195. 68 Ibid. aux pp 214–15. 69 Duncan Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Classical Legal Thought, Cambridge (Mass), Afar, 1998. 70 Ibid. à la p 7. 71 Ibid. à la p 8. 72 Ibid. à la p 11.

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des inflexions dans le temps – la pensée « classique » n’est que d’une époque – mais la structure existe bien en tant que telle au sein de la conscience comme l’agent de « la médiation des contradictions de l’expérience »,73 une façon de neutraliser l’idée de progrès et la dynamique de l’histoire, et d’affirmer cette puissance extratemporelle qui s’attache, pour nous, à la culture.

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C. Sociologie de la culture juridique: le manifeste de Friedman C’est dans l’œuvre de Lawrence Friedman que le concept de « culture juridique » devient résolument moderne et acquiert les vertus (et les défauts) d’un concept dominant au point d’être revendiqué dans un nombre considérable de travaux sur les rapports droit-société depuis sa naissance, semble-t-il en 1969 avec « Legal Culture and Social Development ».74 Ce texte fondateur, délibérément dépouillé de toute référence à des autorités antérieures, se présente comme un manifeste qui entend d’abord sortir le comparatisme des ornières du droit comparé – jusqu’à ce que ce dernier n’adopte à son tour le concept, comme on le verra, pour lui conférer une puissance inédite. Pourquoi attaquer le droit comparé? Parce que, réitèrera Friedman dans plusieurs textes, il conforte l’Etat-nation en le prenant comme terme unique de la comparaison75 et ensuite parce qu’il fonde ses typologies de « systèmes juridiques » ou de « familles de droits » sur « l’agrégation arbitraire » de traits saillants empruntés à l’univers du seul droit positif.76 Il faut installer, pense-t-il, la sociologie au cœur de l’agenda scientifique. Friedman s’acquitte de la tâche en créant d’abord un espace jusqu’alors négligé par les facultés de droit et qu’il nomme la dimension « culturelle » du droit. Celui-ci a donc trois composantes: une composante structurelle (les institutions), une composante substantive ou positive (les lois, les décisions et les doctrines) et une composante culturelle faite des « valeurs et attitudes qui lient le système et qui déterminent la place du système dans la culture de la société dans son ensemble ».77 Il faut permettre de distinguer « les aspects vitaux et vivants d’un système juridique » de ses aspects « fossiles ».78 Le champ d’investigation ainsi ouvert – plutôt en marge qu’au cœur du champ juridique, mais c’est ici une vertu que d’anoblir la marge – touchera toutes les manifestations et réactions des individus et des groupes à l’égard du droit. Au fil de sa plume, Friedman affine le concept en subdivisant les « idées, attitudes, valeurs et croyances que les gens ont à l’égard du système juridique » en une culture « interne », celle des juristes, et une culture« externe », celle des profanes ou lay people.79 On retrouve la bipartition de la culture juridique que nous avons aperçue chez Savigny, mais sans la dimension véritablement créatrice de la « conscience du peuple ». Les études de sociologie juridique, judiciaire, administrative, politique etc., vont s’attacher à décrire cet espace de vie juridique adossé au droit positif tout en s’en voulant affranchi. Mais le choix de ne pas intégrer le droit positif et théorique ou doctrinal dans l’objet va rendre la problématique singulièrement dépendante de lui et handicaper le projet comparatiste. Quand la science politique friedmanienne tente par exemple en 1996 de comparer les cultures juridiques européennes, elle prend appui sur un large « syndrome » de valeurs telles que « l’appréciation que l’on accorde à la liberté individuelle », « le soutien accordé par chacun à l’Etat de droit » et « la perception qu’a chacun de la règle de droit ».80 Que sont ces références sinon les attendus du sens commun de la culture juridique américaine ainsi apposée par a priori sur les cultures d’Europe dont on postule qu’elles diffèrent les unes des autres – sinon pourquoi comparer? – tout en supposant que ces valeurs sont pertinentes? Chez Friedman et ses continuateurs, comme l’a souligné Roger Cotterrell, « il n’y a pas à strictement parler de culture juridique, mais seulement de la culture envisagée selon un point de vue juridiquement valable pour l’observateur ».81 Toutes les sociologies du droit ont certes vu leurs forces et leur dynamisme décuplés par le 73 Ibid. à la p 34. 74 Lawrence M Friedman, « Legal Culture and Social Development » (1969) 4:1 Law & Soc’y Rev 29. 75 Ibid. à la p 32. 76 Ibid. à la p 36. 77 Ibid. à la p 34. 78 Ibid. à la p 36. 79 Lawrence M Friedman, The Legal System: A Social Science Perspective, New York, Russell Sage, 1975 à la p 233. 80 James L Gibson et Gregory A Caldeira, « The Legal Cultures of Europe » (1996) 30:1 Law & Soc’y Rev 55 à la p 56. 81 Roger Cotterrell, « The Concept of Legal Culture » dans D Nelken, dir, Comparing Legal Cultures, Aldershot (R-U), Dartmouth, 1997, 13 à la p 26.

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modèle de Friedman. Il faut néanmoins relever qu’à défaut de prendre en compte la part artisanale de « la lettre noire du droit », sa faculté d’absorber l’histoire et de lire la société – ce que Savigny réussissait à faire via l’idée de « droit politique » – et à cause de la réduction du droit à cette image tronquée, cette voie sociologique d’étude de la culture juridique ne permet pas plus de repenser le concept de droit que n’y parvient le concept de pluralisme juridique. Le contrecoup de cette négligence est de subir l’influence de ce droit que les rapports sociaux étudiés par le sociologue sont censés éclairer d’une lumière crue. Dans un texte récent,82 Friedman associe l’avènement de ce qu’il appelle « l’individualisme expressif » – c’est-à-dire de l’individualisme philosophiquement absolu de l’humain autofondé et libre de toutes attaches sociales – à l’émergence d’une « culture des droits de l’homme ».83 On en a traité ailleurs.84 Notons toutefois l’emploi de nouveau problématique de l’idée de culture. Le bât blesse en raison du parti pris idéologique du propos. L’universalisme de la notion moderne des droits subjectifs de l’individu porte atteinte, comme le note Friedman mais sans en tirer les conclusions,85 à toutes les cultures autres que cette « culture » surplombante. Tous les « collectifs sociaux » sont fondamentalement niés ou dénoncés comme des entraves à l’épanouissement du Moi. Friedman, grand intellectuel du droit, semble négliger le fait, déjà évoqué ici, que même l’individualisme le plus exacerbé nécessite des formes holistes pour exister. Faute d’en accepter le principe on s’expose à soumettre la recherche aux effets d’une idéologie, fût-elle aussi généreuse que l’est celle des droits de l’homme. D. Multiculturalisme et « valeurs essentielles » Infanticides rituels, crimes d’honneur, mariages forcés, polygamie, excision (clitoridectomie), violences faites aux femmes … autant de pratiques réprouvées par la loi occidentale (ou par sa version mondialisée des droits de l’homme) mais justifiables, aux yeux d’une certaine doctrine, en raison des appartenances culturelles de leurs auteurs.86 Les études de « défense culturelle » (cultural defence) se multiplient depuis deux ou trois décennies, un peu comme une manière propre aux juristes criminalistes de croiser la problématique culturelle.87 Généralement, cette problématique trouve à s’exprimer comme l’un des aspects des phénomènes migratoires lorsque le droit pénal du pays d’accueil, en Europe et en Amérique du nord, réprime des actions concevables, acceptables ou recommandées dans ce que l’on postule comme étant « la culture » d’origine de la personne qui a commis une action déterminée. Dans une doctrine judiciaire ou barrelière relayée par les théorisations doctrinales des criminalistes, la culture du migrant (cela s’entend de migrations plus ou moins récentes et des générations issues de la migration), pour ce qu’elle enjoint la personne d’agir, constitue une légitimation de l’action et donc une raison d’atténuer sa responsabilité au regard du droit du pays d’accueil, d’où l’idée d’excuse culturelle. On ne reprendra pas la problématique dans son ensemble mais seulement quelques aspects qui intéressent une évolution particulière du concept de culture juridique. Qu’une excision (clitoridectomie) soit effectuée sur une enfant par déférence à la coutume originaire ou que soient visés des médias ou des journalistes qui auraient manqué de respect au prophète Mahomet, nous touchons ici un point de friction systémique entre des univers de représentations qui, outre le pénal – toujours spectaculaire et emblématique –, atteint un ensemble de valeurs et de pratiques différenciées qui se crispent de façon critique au contact les unes des autres, comme des injonctions contradictoires. L’attitude condamnable est, dans le code opposé, une attitude souhaitable, et réciproquement. La conciliation des normes se fera, dira-t-on, sur le terrain réputé universel des droits

82 Friedman, Human Rights Culture, supra note 6. 83 Ibid. aux pp 47–53. 84 Louis Assier-Andrieu, « Le crépuscule des cultures: L’affaire Pitcairn et l’idéologie des droits humains » (2012) 82 Dr et Soc 767. 85 Friedman, Human Rights Culture, supra note 6 à la p 48. 86 Voir Marie-Claire Foblets et Alison Dundes Renteln, dir, Multicultural Jurisprudence: Comparative Perspectives on the Cultural Defense, Oxford & Portland, Hart, 2009; et voir contra, Pascale Fournier, « Courtiser Dieu devant les tribunaux occidentaux » (2010) 25:2 RCDS 167. 87 Pour un aperçu de l’extension politique et surtout idéologique de la problématique multiculturaliste de la « défense culturelle » aux Etats-Unis, voir Alison Dundes Renteln, The Cultural Defense, New York, Oxford University Press, 2004.

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humains mais cette universalité même sera discréditée au nom de telle ou telle culture comme constituant une manœuvre occidentale.88 En France, par exemple, les mariages forcés sont tenus pour « des atteintes aux libertés civiques que ni la tradition ni la coutume ne sauraient justifier ».89 Malgré ses politiques publiques d’« accommodements raisonnables », le Canada officiellement multiculturaliste est engagé jusque dans sa juridiction suprême à « une recherche d’équilibre potentiellement clivante sur le plan politique » entre « confiance publique » et reconnaissance des « différences ethniques, religieuses ou culturelles ».90 Les discours savants deviennent aussi pratiques que les discours politiques ou confessionnels pour penser l’élaboration disparate de ce que Will Kymlicka avait appelé « une citoyenneté fondée sur l’appartenance différenciée à un groupe » (groupdifferentiated citizenship).91 Or le concept démocratique moderne de citoyenneté suppose, et c’est flagrant en France, l’abandon des appartenances autres que celle, souveraine, de l’individu à la nation ou à l’Etat. En la matière, les analyses sont souvent portées à une incandescence fort peu sereine ou, plus prosaïquement, elles ornent de rhétorique des préjugés antagonistes au nom de cultures divergentes. Certains criminalistes ont élaboré, à partir de la pratique des tribunaux, une doctrine du « diktat culturel » (cultural dictation) en vertu de laquelle l’individu est privé de la faculté de choisir dès lors qu’une impérieuse leçon de sa culture lui impose obéissance.92 En somme, nous aurions affaire à un véritable déterminisme de la culture qui anéantirait jusqu’à la notion d’individu libre et celle de citoyen souverain. A l’autre extrémité du curseur, on voit évoluer les politiques d’immigration des pays d’accueil, notamment en Europe, dans le sens de la prise en compte de ce que l’immigration n’est désormais que secondairement fondée sur le lien singulier du migrant au travail et s’accomplit beaucoup plus dans le cadre du groupe, familial, ethnique ou religieux. Comme le dit Liav Orgad à propos de l’Union Européenne, « l’écart entre les valeurs et les modes de vie des autochtones et des migrants devient difficile à réduire », et cet auteur va jusqu’à parler d’une « défense culturelle des nations » rendue nécessaire pour promouvoir l’idée de libre arbitre et de liberté contre l’affirmation du fondamentalisme.93 Par delà la réification des cultures et des appartenances que provoque la mise en contact par migrations de leurs aspects les plus incompatibles, le territoire du débat se signale par la valorisation des « séparations ethniques » au détriment de « l’intelligibilité relative de la manière d’agir d’autrui » que Max Weber situait au principe de toute appartenance commune.94 La place demeure pour une approche culturaliste qui ne soit pas celle du déterminisme culturel de l’autochtone soucieux de maintenir ses « valeurs essentielles »95 ou du migrant déterminé à suivre les siennes. Cette approche ne saurait être seulement la parole d’expert que profère l’ethnologue spécialiste de la société d’origine du prévenu dans les affaires d’infractions culturelles. Un espace existe, sur l’articulation même de la distinction des représentations autochtones, qui ne se résume pas à l’abstractionnisme des droits de l’homme mais comprenne des formes holistes comme la nation ou la communauté des nations, le pays ou la communauté locale, et des représentations des migrants, de plus en plus binationaux, qui dans le cas des musulmans peuvent en appeler à ce holisme majeur que constitue la communauté des croyants. D’un côté, les autochtones, il existe la place d’une redécouverte des dimensions holistes de la culture, lesquelles ne sont pas dépourvues de mécanismes d’accueil, et de l’autre, les migrants ou issus de migrants, il existe la place d’une individualisation plus marquée des références pouvant conduire à l’adoption même des formes holistes de la société d’accueil, une fois celles-ci réinventées. 88 Pour une discussion du caractère occidental de l’universalisme, voir Upendra Baxi, The Future of Human Rights, ch 6: « What Is Living and Dead in Relativism », 3e éd, New Delhi, Oxford University Press, 2010, aux pp 187–233. 89 Propos d’une ministre en charge de la parité. Voir aussi Brigitte Clark et Claudina Richards, « The Prevention and Prohibition of Forced Marriages – A Comparative Approach » (2008) 57:3 ICLQ 501. 90 Voir, à propos notamment de l’arrêt Bruker c Markovitz, 2007 SCC 54, [2007] 3 SCR 607, Helge Dedek, « Complexity of Transnational Sources: Canada » (2011) 1:3 ISAIDAT Law Review 38. 91 Will Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship, Oxford, Clarendon, 1995 à la p 35. 92 William I Torry, « Multicultural Jurisprudence and the Culture Defense » (1999) 44 J Legal Pluralism 127 aux pp 128–30. 93 Liav Orgad, « ‘Cultural Defense’ of Nations: Cultural Citizenship in France, Germany and the Netherlands » (2009) 15:6 Eur LJ 719 à la p 722. 94 Max Weber, Economie et société, t 1, traduit par Eric de Dampierre, Paris, Plon, 1971 à la p 418. 95 Conseil d’Etat (France), 27 juin 2008, tel que cité par Orgad, supra note 93 à la p 726.

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E. Comparer les cultures On ne saurait refaire l’histoire du droit comparé, depuis l’œuvre active de législation comparée jusqu’à l’activisme pacifique pour l’unification juridique du monde et jusqu’à, plus récemment, l’émergence d’une discipline scientifique plus proche des contextes et donc des lectures sociologiques.96 La perspective comparative, que nous ne cessons de croiser au fil des approches de la culture, est indissociable de toute ambition d’envergure en sciences de la société. Le droit comparé semble s’être renouvelé en substituant l’idée de culture à celles, « fatiguées » de « système juridique » ou de « familles de droits », ce qui ne veut pas dire qu’il n’y ait d’important que ce qui se rapporte à ce renouvellement.97 Le souci que nous allons à présent évoquer est celui de la relativité. Selon Raluca Bercea, le souci de relativité « semble bien devoir constituer l’un des piliers de l’entendement adéquat à la complexité d’une démarche comparative qui représente/interprète à la fois ».98 L’idée de culture s’impose à la pente relativiste et, comme l’écrit Pierre Legrand, « un droit s’inscrit inéluctablement en une culture juridique … . Il est prescrit par elle ».99 Ce renouvellement ne fait pas pour autant réapparaître les très réifiantes (et idéales) typologies cartographiques. Tout au contraire, une sensibilité aiguë aux convergences issues de la globalisation – qu’elles soient réelles ou idéalisées – semble précipiter les chercheurs vers les dimensions sociologiques et anthropologiques de cultures juridiques détachées du seul prisme stato-national pour envisager naissances, résistances et transformations de ce que William Twining appelle les « contextes d’interlégalité » et les « arrangements subglobaux ».100 Certains affirment même que « l’approche anthropologique … est la démarche essentielle pour entreprendre le développement d’un programme général de droit comparé au niveau mondial ».101 Deux dimensions semblent particulièrement notablesparmi les tendances plus ou moins récentes de cette discipline d’ouverture: la confrontation entre holisme et individualisme et l’affirmation du contenu holiste de la culture, notamment dans le contexte de l’Union européenne. La première dimension met en exergue, par-delà la classique distinction et opposition (exagérée) entre droits de Common Law et droits civilistes, la spécificité du droit occidental qui paraît unifier territoires et pratiques sous l’égide de traits culturels communs, au premier chef desquels figurent le rationalisme et l’esprit de système. La démarcation culturelle entre l’Occident et ce qui n’est pas l’Occident (une démarcation sur laquelle nous reviendrons) ressort clairement de la pensée de Mark van Hoecke, par exemple, qui se saisit volontiers des métaconceptions de l’ordre juridique en abordant, depuis le droit comparé, des distinctions plus familières aux sociologues et aux anthropologues. Par opposition aux droits africains, réputés religieux « par essence », « les sociétés occidentales … ont complètement perdu tout lien entre le droit et les visions métaphysiques du monde qui ont pu l’englober ».102 Au vrai, la sécularisation a permis d’abandonner l’enchâssement du juridique dans le religieux et c’est, pour Van Hoecke et Warrington, le christianisme qui a permis l’autonomisation historique du droit.103 Quid de l’expansion géographique de cette conception? La colonisation entre naturellement en ligne de compte mais elle n’est pas, comme trop souvent, le tout du raisonnement. « [L]e droit, pour les Européens, est avant tout un système, une forme de logique, une géométrie, un assemblage cohérent où tout peut être réduit en principes, en concepts et en catégories ».104  96 On se reportera sur cette évolution à E Örücü, « Comparative Law » dans Stanley Katz, dir, The Oxford International Encyclopedia of Legal History, vol 3, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2009, 97.  97 Sur l’épuisement des anciennes catégories et la nécessité de leur substituer celle de culture, voir David Nelken, « Defining and Using the Concept of Legal Culture » dans Esin Örücü et David Nelken, dir, Comparative Law: A Handbook, Oxford & Portland, Hart, 2007, 109.  98 Raluca Bercea, « Toute comparaison des droits est une fiction » dans P Legrand, dir, Comparer les droits, résolument, Paris, Presses Universitaires de France, 2009, 41 à la p 65.  99 Pierre Legrand, Le droit comparé, Paris, Presses Universitaires de France, 2011 aux pp 5–6; voir aussi ibid. à la p 125(« la comparaison des droits sera CULTURELLE ou ne sera pas »). 100 William Twining, General Jurisprudence: Understanding Law from a Global Perspective, Cambridge (R-U), Cambridge University Press, 2009 aux pp 69–71. 101 Mark van Hoecke et Michael Warrington, « Legal Cultures, Legal Paradigms and Legal Doctrine: Towards a New Model for Comparative Law » (1998) 47:3 ICLQ 495 à la p 502. 102 Van Hoecke, « Family Law Transfers », supra note 43. 103 Van Hoecke et Warrington, supra note 101 à la p 502. 104 Ibid. aux pp 504–5.

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C’est en outre, nous dit-on, son caractère rationnel qui a permis au droit occidental de s’imposer en tant que droit dans d’autres cultures « dépourvues d’un ensemble aussi développé de concepts juridiques, de principes juridiques et d’institutions juridiques ».105 Le terme de « culture juridique » sert ainsi d’habitacle à un processus différencié de maturation et de diffusion du droit occidental, et ce processus apparaît d’autant plus sommaire que l’on s’éloigne de ses complexes origines. La conscience de la relativité historique des cultures juridiques, et parmi celles-ci de cet « assemblage » gigantesque qu’est le droit occidental, d’extension planétaire, place le comparatiste devant l’ampleur et devant les limites de son objet, à l’abri de la tentation d’universaliser les conceptions occidentales par des généralisations – une méthode dont le droit comparé des « familles » et des « systèmes » n’était pas avare. Considérons à présent comment le comparatisme culturel conduit à réinvestir de holisme les formes constitutionnelles. Tandis qu’un sociologue comme Roger Cotterrell considère que la culture juridique ne peut être valablement étudiée que dans des terrains de petite taille comme les fameuses îles Trobriand de Malinowski,106 le droit comparé semble attiré par la culture juridique comme par un nouveau continent à défricher, sans être effrayé par la perspective métajuridique d’explorer la relativité du rationalisme ou les racines de l’individualisme. Traditionnellement une affaire de juristes privatistes, le droit comparé s’est doté d’une dimension publiciste et constitutionnaliste, peut-être en raison de la crise annoncée des Etats-nations, de l’affirmation des supra ou des infra nationalités et aussi en raison de l’augmentation par pression internationale du nombre d’Etats dotés de constitutions, ce qui ne manque pas de poser le problème de la compatibilité du constitutionnalisme avec telle ou telle culture locale ou stato-nationale. Les approches de publicistes sont des approches de juristes dont la vocation première est de penser les formes holistes que le droit confère aux collectivités humaines. Pour Paul Kahn, l’Etat de droit est « une façon de comprendre l’unité de la communauté dans le temps et de chacun en tant que porteur de cette histoire ».107 Lecteur de Geertz, il invoque le précédent anthropologique pour revendiquer une « discipline culturelle de l’étude du droit » lequel n’est au fond qu’une « collection de commentaires interprétatifs ».108 Le trait saillant qui émane du culturalisme constitutionnel, ou de certains constitutionnalistes culturalistes, est la détermination relativiste, la façon de désacraliser l’objet culte des régimes démocratiques que représente la constitution. Ce trait semble émaner de l’appréhension de la globalisation sous son aspect de laboratoire d’un constitutionnalisme unique. Pour Kahn, le rôle d’une constitution est « d’assujettir la politique aux normes supérieures de la raison »109 mais ce phénomène n’est, pour lui, ni uniforme ni universel. L’exemple américain lui permet de repenser l’Etat de droit avant tout comme un objet de croyances et de production de sens. Avec l’abolition de la monarchie, le droit lui-même est devenu roi et l’Etat de droit une religion civique dont la Cour suprême serait l’abbatiale.110 Divergeant du prisme strictement nationaliste ethnocentrique, le modèle américain d’incarnation de la raison dans le droit n’est conçu que comme l’une des variations de l’entreprise, diversement accomplie, d’arraisonnement du politique. Par cet arraisonnement, lorsqu’il existe, l’Etat de droit acquiert une autorité supérieure au politique et à l’économique. Chez Kahn, cette distinction est le propre de l’Occident. D’autres Etats peuvent posséder des constitutions mais « elles peuvent ne pas servir le genre de fonction qu’assume la constitution en Occident ».111 La culture constitutionnelle, telle que mise en œuvre par les cours constitutionnelles qui veillent à subordonner les intérêts au droit, serait donc une construction historique substantiellement relative. En revanche elle peut être imitée, mais ces imitations restent formelles et leur contenu s’amenuise à mesure que l’on s’éloigne de l’épicentre où le droit correspond à une vision rationnelle

105 Mark van Hoecke, « European Legal Cultures in a Context of Globalisation », à paraître. Je remercie Mark van Hoecke de m’avoir communiqué ce texte. 106 Cotterrell, supra note 81 aux pp 25–6. 107 Paul W Kahn, The Cultural Study of Law: Reconstructing Legal Scholarship, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1999 à la p 6. 108 Ibid. aux pp 39, 54. 109 Paul W Kahn, « Comparative Constitutionalism in a New Key » (2003) 101 Mich L Rev 2677. 110 Ibid. 111 Ibid. à la p 2697.

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du monde. Kahn plaide ainsi pour un comparatisme limité, et surtout pas normatif, car « l’approche culturelle [du droit] est un antidote puissant à l’idéal libéral de gouvernance mondiale ».112 C’est à propos de l’Europe, lieu d’origine et de dépérissement annoncé du régime westphalien de l’Etatnation, que certaines réflexions culturalistes s’attachent à chercher dans l’histoire la matière d’un « consensus moral » que le temps présent ne fournit pas ou ne fournit plus.113 Dans une période de « souveraineté tardive » (late sovereignty), le demos particulier que les Etats-nations fournissaient à la démocratie doit repenser les critères de son unité.114 Comme l’unité européenne a, par-delà les textes, pour constitution le patrimoine de ses valeurs communes – liberté, démocratie, droits de l’homme, Etat de droit – pourquoi ne pas puiser dans l’histoire de la haute culture philosophique le moyen de mettre chair et sang sur le squelette bureaucratique de l’Union? C’est le pas que franchit Ian Ward dans un texte célèbre où « l’au-delà du constitutionnalisme » est conçu comme la nécessité de faire revivre Erasme, Thomas More, Althusius ou Leibniz pour donner force normative à une vision de la respublica christiana, une vision qui, avant les Traités de Westphalie, avait permis de penser l’unité culturelle du sous-continent.115 IV. Décoloniser la pensée juridique Les cheminements que l’on vient d’évoquer, très partiellement, sont les victimes plus ou moins conscientes de deux facteurs qui altèrent les dispositifs épistémologiques et handicapent la progression des connaissances. Le premier élément concerne la propriété irradiante de l’appareil doctrinal ou intellectuel du droit sur les démarches qui en entreprennent l’étude scientifique. Le second est celui de l’empreinte des conceptions juridiques occidentales sur l’ensemble des sociétés. Le premier intéresse un véritable impérialisme méthodologique (sans doute une des propriétés de l’autopoïèse) qui interdirait de penser autrement que conformément aux images du droit les réalités qui échappent à son empire – du moins si nous nous accordons sur le fait que le droit ne règle jamais la totalité des rapports sociaux. Le second problème peut être formulé comme celui de l’interculturalité: tout se passe comme si l’épicentre, le domaine où les curseurs analytiques, les critères d’appréciation et les paramètres de la comparaison, trouvent la plénitude de leurs acceptions, leur sens profond, était le droit occidental; les cultures non occidentales se singularisant par des conceptions où, le plus souvent, au plus près des représentations, le droit est englobé par la religion ou par la cosmogonie et crédité par ce moyen de la faculté de régler tous les comportements. L’impérialisme théorique semble, à y bien regarder, une conséquence pratique de l’impérialisme géographique et tous deux proviennent de l’histoire singulière d’un monde dont les catégories dominantes de la pensée et des modes transculturels d’organisation sont issus de l’histoire contingente de l’Europe, de son expansion démographique, territoriale et intellectuelle, de la faculté de sécréter chez les autres une sorte de nécessité d’imitation. Certes, il y eut le phénomène de la colonisation, essentiellement de la fin du XVe siècle au mitan du XXe, mais peut-on soumettre au seul prisme colonial ou post-colonial le rayonnement conceptuel et institutionnel de cette concrétisation particulière de la culture qu’est le droit d’origine occidentale? Le présupposé universaliste qui anime la pensée scientifique est lui-même fondé sur un préjugé rationaliste qui possède une genèse, une évolution et des façons de s’imposer. L’une des conséquences de l’impérialisme universaliste est de considérer toute vision relative comme du relativisme, c’est-à-dire comme une justification de la barbarie du moment qu’elle est culturelle. Nous savons que le principe d’universalité anthropologique du droit, dont on doit la « preuve » à Malinowski, est issu d’une volonté de « meilleure administration coloniale » de populations dont, dès lors, on répertoriait les « coutumes » ou les « droits coutumiers », ces merveilleuses inventions conceptuelles que les Etats européens ont expérimentées pour administrer leurs paysans avant d’en innerver les politiques 112 Ibid. à la p 2679. 113 Sur les rapports de l’Europe à la souveraineté, voir Jeremy Rabkin, Law without Nations? Why Constitutional Government Requires Sovereign States, Princeton (NJ), Princeton University Press, 2005 aux pp 130–57. 114 Neil Walker, « The Idea of Constitutional Pluralism » (2002) 65 Mod L Rev 317 à la p 346. 115 Ian Ward, « Beyond Constitutionalism: The Search for a European Political Imagination » (2001) 7:1 Eur LJ 24.

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impériales.116 La contextualisation n’invalide pas les catégories fondamentales de l’esprit et le droit en est une, objectera-t-on. Il est clair que toutes les sociétés possèdent des représentations de l’ordre social et des modes de gestion des désordres. Leur étude transculturelle appartient notamment à la communauté des legal anthropologists mais pourquoi donc s’attacher à nommer « droit » ces opérations et ainsi prendre le risque d’assujettir la description scientifique à l’agenda pratique du droit occidental? Pourquoi surtout persister à se faire les agents de l’impérialisme méthodologique en nommant « droit », et en analysant par les moyens de cette conception du monde normé qu’est le droit théorique, des aspects de la culture qui, selon les peuples et selon les époques, ressortissent plutôt du politique, du religieux, du mythologique ou de l’économique, toutes catégories elles-mêmes dépendantes de leurs conditions historiques d’émergence en tant que « valeurs » et par conséquent tributaires des pensées qui les assument à titre scientifique ? On objectera ici que tous les concepts des sciences sociales (hormis les néologismes absolus) font usage de vocables dont aucun n’est neutre à l’origine et qui le deviennent par convention de scientificité. Mais, si les vocables ne sont pas neutres, ils n’appartiennent pas tous à un ordre tranchant comme le droit, cette « machinerie dotée de dents » comme l’a dit Llewellyn, qui ne tranche précisément qu’au moyen de mots. Loin de vouloir jeter le bébé avec l’eau du bain en déclinant l’offre d’étude scientifique du droit, je voudrais rapidement proposer une approche, certes pas neuve ni originale, mais souvent victime des compartimentages de l’érudition et de la division sociale du travail scientifique. Il s’agit de suggérer à l’universalisme et à l’anti-culturalisme une sorte de moratoire informatif: un bénéfice d’inventaire destiné à pallier les aspects aporétiques de l’équivalence des normativités. L’occidentalisme, a écrit Maureen Cain, c’est « supposer la “mêmeté” des catégories fondamentales de la culture, de la pratique et des institutions ».117 Comment en surmonter les effets sans auparavant en faire l’étude méthodique et systématique? Or, l’occidentalisme juridique est à la fois dans la science et dans les faits, dans les représentations et dans les institutions. Le pluralisme et le culturalisme juridiques nous semblent par conséquent trop souvent des moyens de contourner l’obstacle, pas vraiment de le franchir. Si les apports du pluralisme normatif et de la comparaison des cultures sont considérables sur le plan des connaissances empiriques, certaines de ces démarches n’en négligent pas moins parfois de repenser ce qui les structure, ce point aveugle et toujours gênant que constitue la juridicité intrinsèque de propos dont le but affiché est de prendre la mesure relative du droit. Le phénomène est accentué par la globalisation qui tend à substituer « la croyance [en ce] que les individus recherchent toujours le bénéfice individuel »118 aux patientes élaborations holistes de cultures dont la diversité s’apparente de plus en plus à un contresens historique. En acceptant la détermination du droit par l’économie, qui n’aurait besoin que d’une régulation ex post facto, le juridique devient contractuel et la justice une affaire privée. Les tentatives de constructions holistes valables pour le genre humain, comme les droits de l’homme, semblent ainsi potentiellement destructrices des holismes culturels et n’échappent pas à l’occidentalisme. Claude Lévi-Strauss dénonçait ce biais dès après la Déclaration universelle des droits de l’homme : « Les grandes déclarations des droits de l’homme ont … cette force et cette faiblesse d’énoncer un idéal trop souvent oublieux du fait que l’homme ne réalise pas sa nature dans une humanité abstraite ».119 N’y aurait-il de droit qu’occidental? Dans sa magistrale exploration des « traditions juridiques du monde », H. Patrick Glenn identifie le « droit chtonique » comme l’une de ces traditions.120 C’est le droit qui caractérise les « autochtones », précolombiens d’Amérique, ante-occidentaux du Pacifique et d’Afrique. Ce droit, nous dit 116 Souvent cité comme l’un des classiques de l’anthropologie juridique, le Handbook of Tswana Law and Custom d’Isaac Schapera (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1938) est par exemple au sens strict un manuel d’administration coloniale qui taille à la serpe dans les conceptions vernaculaires pour les forcer à rentrer dans le juridisme de l’observateur. Sur la soumission au droit des paysanneries européennes, on peut se reporter à certains de mes travaux comme « Coutume savante et droit rustique. Sur la légalité paysanne » (1986) Etudes rurales 105 et Le peuple et la loi: Anthropologie historique des droits paysans en Catalogne française, Paris, Librairie générale de droit et de jurisprudence, 1987. 117 Maureen Cain, « Orientalism, Occidentalism and the Sociology of Crime » (2000) 40:2 Brit J Crim 239. 118 Jean-François Gaudreault-Desbiens, « La critique économiste de la tradition romano-germanique » (2010) 4 RTD civ 683 à la p 695. 119 Claude Lévi-Strauss, Race et histoire, Paris, UNESCO, 1952 à la p 23. 120 H Patrick Glenn, Legal Traditions of the World: Sustainable Diversity in Law, 4e éd, New York, Oxford University Press, 2010 au ch 3 [Glenn, Legal Traditions of the World].

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Glenn, « n’a rien d’immédiatement analogue à ce qui est entendu en Occident sous cette expression ».121 Dans ces sociétés gouvernées par « l’informalisme », sans scribes, sans institutions, sans propriété individuelle, le droit « chtonique » est « inextricablement enchevêtré dans toutes les croyances ».122 La justice est restauratrice, la possession collective et l’individualisme absent. Pourquoi alors persister à qualifier de « juridique » cette « tradition » sinon pour l’inclure dans un espace discursif de référence où le juridique trouve sa densité et sa puissance sémantique: le droit occidental? En fait, ces « autochtones », qui ne trouvent leur unité que par rapport à l’Occident et sur un mode négatif de sociétés « sans », sont conviés dans cet espace par Glenn pour y servir de modèle, selon la tradition du « bon sauvage », ou d’« alternative radicale, intellectuellement cohérente et avec cent mille ans d’expérience et d’application ».123 Pourtant, le modèle n’est pas parfait et les Aztèques, avec leurs institutions judiciaires sophistiquées et leur concept de droit subjectif constituent une insistante exception.124 C’est en ce sens qu’une dose de relativisme historique s’impose. Si l’on accepte que la catégorie de droit est une invention culturelle de l’Occident, il n’est pas impensable que, sans en être nullement influencées, d’autres cultures aient pu élaborer leurs propres versions d’une normativité séparée du religieux, du politique et de l’économique. Reprise il y a peu par David Goldman pour en aborder la récurrence dans la globalisation,125 l’expression ambitieuse de « tradition juridique occidentale » fut adoptée et caractérisée par Harold Berman.126 Il s’agit pour Berman avant tout d’une « manière de penser » qui « même aux heures glorieuses de l’Etat-nation » repose sur « la croyance en l’existence d’un corps de droit dont la portée excédât le droit de la plus haute autorité politique et qui s’est successivement appelé le droit divin, le droit naturel et plus récemment les droits de l’homme ».127 Depuis les travaux de Louis Gernet sur la spécification du droit en Grèce antique,128 c’est l’histoire romaine qui semble évoquer le mieux, par exemple sous la plume d’Aldo Schiavone, cette genèse localisée d’un complexe agencement culturel où se façonne « une spécificité prescriptive ailleurs ignorée ».129 L’impératif pluridisciplinaire accompagne la problématique du droit qui ne peut pas (ou ne peut plus) se satisfaire des clivages territoriaux entre sous-champs et sous-disciplines. Les historiens de l’Antiquité parlent aux sociologues du pluralisme et le médiéviste Berman ou le comparatiste Glenn parlent aux anthropologues et aux constitutionnalistes des cultures juridiques. La projection planétaire de la vision occidentale de la juridicité a suscité la production de multiples aveux indigènes par lesquels le sujet, autochtone ou souverain, se trouve voué à formuler ses prétentions dans les termes mêmes du régime juridique qui est venu l’assujettir. Le mimétisme envers l’Occident est ainsi non seulement dans l’essence des reconnaissances de droits indigènes ou autochtones mais aussi dans les protocoles que nous employons pour en rendre compte scientifiquement. Affectée par cette puissance sémantique du droit occidental, la pensée sur le droit peut être envisagée comme un territoire en instance de décolonisation. En 1941, Karl Llewellyn en avait mis le moyen intellectuel sur l’établi, dans les chapitres théoriques qu’il a rédigés de The Cheyenne Way.130

121 Ibid. à la p 68. 122 Ibid. à la p 73. L’aversion de H Patrick Glenn pour le concept de culture tient à ce qu’il mettrait l’accent sur ce qui sépare plutôt que sur ce qui unifie tandis qu’à ses yeux le concept de « tradition », adversaire d’une « épistémologie du conflit », procède d’une « épistémologie de la conciliation » (H Patrick Glenn, « Legal Cultures and Legal Traditions » dans Mark van Hoecke, dir, Epistemology and Methodology of Comparative Law, Oxford & Portland, Hart, 2004, 7). Depuis Herder, la singularité des peuples ou ensembles de peuples, qu’on les nomme cultures ou traditions, entrave avec insistance les conceptions universalistes, au besoin, comme Glenn l’a senti, en entrant en conflit avec elles. 123 Glenn, Legal Traditions of the World, supra note 120 à la p 70. 124 Ibid. aux pp 62, 72. 125 David B Goldman, Globalisation and the Western Legal Tradition: Recurring Patterns of Law and Authority, Cambridge (R-U), Cambridge University Press, 2007. 126 Harold J Berman, Law and Revolution: The Formation of Western Legal Tradition, Cambridge (Mass), Harvard University Press, 1983 aux pp 1–45. 127 Ibid. à la p 45. 128 Louis Gernet, « Droit et prédroit en Grèce ancienne » (1951) L’année sociologique (3e) 21. 129 Aldo Schiavone, Ius: L’invention du droit en Occident, traduit par Jean Bouffartigue, Paris, Belin, 2008 à la p 67. 130 Karl N Llewellyn et E Adamson Hoebel, The Cheyenne Way: Conflict and Case Law in Primitive Jurisprudence, Norman (Okla), University of Oklahoma Press, 1941.

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« Un concept juridique, écrit-il alors, est une chandelle qui illumine le fonctionnement de la société » car « il représente … un effort de diagnostic d’un trouble social récurrent ».131 Focalisons-nous sur les troubles, les conflits, les désordres, enjoint-il, en loyal American case lawyer, et nous apercevrons d’un œil neuf les raisons d’être de concepts usés par l’histoire de leurs emplois. Surtout, Llewellyn entreprend de nous libérer de l’emprise réifiante des concepts dits englobants, ceux qui en science sociale et en droit nous servent à nommer les modes holistes de l’existence commune – ce que Tylor appelait le « tout social » (social whole). Pour y parvenir, Llewellyn fait sienne la perspective héraclitéenne de la destruction possible de tout groupe qui ne veillerait pas à assurer les conditions de sa perpétuation en tant que groupe: « chaque groupe est confronté au processus de devenir et de rester un groupe ».132 Chaque conflit ou chaque prétention à la justice est lié à une conception de « l’entièreté pertinente ou du groupe ou du Tout » qui sert de cadre à la prétention et de lieu à l’exercice de la justice.133 Et « si l’ouvrage du droit vient à faillir, alors le groupe explose ou se désagrège ou meurt ».134 Avec le chaos comme horizon épistémologique, chaque concept destiné à traduire le diagnostic d’un trouble social récurrent, et l’entièreté pertinente (et éventuellement variable) au nom de laquelle le diagnostic est posé, se trouvent installés dans un rapport constant de définition mutuelle. Trop souvent négligée ou tenue pour acquise ou pour vraie, la vie des concepts est, insistons sur ce point, d’autant plus cruciale à l’intelligence du droit qu’ils y sont tout ensemble descriptifs et normatifs. Comme l’ordonnancement juridique lui-même, ils procèdent d’une histoire longue et d’une extension transculturelle. Ainsi, comme y aspirent les tenants d’un au-delà du constitutionnalisme ou, si l’on veut, d’une métapolitique, le demos, ce « tout social » de la démocratie, devient lui-même un objet relatif et désacralisé, et l’existence collective ou holiste devient pensable pour ce qu’elle est et non plus comme il est normatif de l’orienter. V. Conclusion Comme l’humain est un « animal sociable » et que la société se présente toujours comme « déjà-là », les sciences sociales et juridiques ne résistent parfois pas à la tentation de supposer pérenne qu’il existe de la société et qu’il y aura toujours des formalisations holistes. Or, pas plus la famille que l’Etat ou le peuple constituant sont des entités intangibles qui s’habilleraient d’atours changeants selon les lieux et les époques. Ils sont le fruit non généralisable de l’expérience acquise par la rumeur des âges, qu’une autre rumeur peut emporter. Peut-être verra-t-on une contradiction entre la conception relativiste du droit comme fruit de l’expérience d’une culture, ou d’un ensemble discret de cultures, et la théorie llewellynienne du conflit créateur pour toutes les cultures. Au vrai, la focalisation sur le conflit et sur ses modes sociaux, institutionnels et surtout conceptuels de traitement a pour vertu majeure, comme horizon théorique, de nous amener à concevoir une ethnogenèse du droit que des approches horizontales comme le pluralisme ou la comparaison des cultures peuvent tendre à oblitérer. Elle nous conduit à considérer comment une collectivité humaine, dont les contours sont déterminés par une tension évolutive, invente une multiplicité de « machineries », les normativités, parmi lesquelles certaines spécifient la normativité juridique et, en la spécifiant, manifestent la notion même de leur identité et la perspective de leur perpétuation. L’ordre social devient donc libre de tout préjugé. A l’heure de l’accès idéologique de l’individu à la royauté universelle s’offre ainsi de nouveau l’idée de penser la société aussitôt qu’elle se manifeste, tout autant que l’empire ou la civilisation dont l’histoire se compte en siècles ou en millénaires. Cerner le rôle du droit comme phénomène historique dans les élaborations, les consolidations et les fractures des agrégats sociaux est une étape sensible pour comprendre la nature et le rôle des formes holistes de l’organisation sociale. Le libéralisme économique frappe, au moins depuis la décennie 1980, à la porte des sciences de la société et tout particulièrement de la science juridique. Nous autres chercheurs ne sommes pas moins affectés par le sens commun que quiconque et la sacralité de l’individu comme la marchandisation accélérée du réel nous affectent, qu’on les serve ou qu’on les dénonce. Cependant, nous évoluons dans les alvéoles, de plus en plus indépendantes les unes des autres, de nos savoirs 131 Ibid. à la p 43. 132 Ibid. à la p 273. 133 Ibid. à la p 274. 134 Ibid.

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spécialisés. Le pluralisme et le culturalisme ont le grand mérite de fédérer les approches et de tenter de donner vie à un tableau d’ensemble du droit dans ses implications sociales. Cette voie semble une nécessité. Par sa puissance métaphorique et analogique – qui est parfois, comme on l’a vu, la source de certaines ambiguïtés épistémologiques – le droit pénètre le sens commun d’une manière qui contrarie le sens commun, ne serait-ce que parce qu’il est le lieu privilégié de la distinction du juste et de l’injuste. C’est en cela qu’il paraît à même de convier les autres savoirs sociaux à la reconstitution d’un tableau d’ensemble de ce qui est segmenté par l’idéologie du moment. L’esprit des lois fut la critique que l’on sait de l’absolutisme monarchique et l’une des inspirations de la démocratie moderne. Il fut pourtant écrit d’une plume conservatrice et réactionnaire. Pour plaider en faveur du passé, il fallait en brosser un portrait précis qui rendît la monarchie absolue récente, artificielle et arbitraire, donc illégitime. La portée politique des travaux savants est insondable et Montesquieu fut unique dans son œuvre critique et fondatrice tout à la fois. On peut cependant tenir pour assuré le fait que plus la recherche en sciences juridiques et sociales se plie à l’esprit du moment et moins elle est à même d’en livrer cette critique authentique sans laquelle se profile ce que Rabelais nommait « la ruine de l’âme ».

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Chapter 9

Un-stating Law

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Mark Antaki*

I. Introduction This chapter is an extended reflection on the very suggestive title of the conference – Stateless Law? The Future of the Discipline / Le droit hors d’Etat? L’avenir de la discipline – as well as the original call for papers which accompanied it. The aim of this chapter is to take up and begin to spell out the invitations for thought prompted by the call for papers. Because to teach ‘stateless law’ necessarily involves some understanding of what these words say, and the ‘language games’1 they are or can be a part of, the chapter doubles as a performance of the teaching of stateless law. Indeed, the chapter’s reflection on the title could easily be part of a first class in a course entitled ‘Stateless Law’. As part of a contribution to a conference celebrating the tenth anniversary of the first graduating class of McGill’s transsystemic or integrated teaching programme and aiming to integrate developments in legal thoughts into the teaching of law,2 the chapter is also meant to contribute to reflection on the question of a radically transsystemic or integrated legal education. A radically transsystemic or integrated legal education, one that raises stateless law as a question, must confront the state not simply as an abstract entity but as a way of being-in-the-world. Below, I focus on the state as adverb – statically – and, especially, as adjective – static – so as to begin to articulate what it is to be in the world and live a life in the law ‘statically’.3 II. Static Horizons The titles – plural – of this conference – Stateless Law? The Future of the Discipline / Le droit hors d’État? L’avenir de la discipline – are rich and thought-provoking, even marvellous or delicious. While they gesture beyond the state, they also suggest that the state is so entrenched in the way we think about law that we cannot describe stateless law in any way but in relation to the state. The titles make this suggestion by performing it, first, of course, by including the word ‘state’, but also by alluding to a pedagogical or existential operation of the subtraction of state from law, thereby leaving unclear or amorphous what this ‘future’ of the discipline consists of.4 The idea of stateless law has a radical dimension to it, which the call for papers both calls forth and suppresses. * Associate Professor, Faculty of Law, McGill University. I am grateful for the support of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. I would like to thank Ian Dahlman, Mireille Fournier, Jessica Magonet, Zain Naqi and Alexandra Popovici for their comments and suggestions. Mireille Fournier is to be thanked for the title of the piece. 1 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1958) at aphorism 23. 2 McGill University Faculty of Law and Quebec Research Centre of Private and Comparative Law, Call for Conference Papers, “Stateless Law? The Future of the Discipline” (conference: 28–29 September 2012), online: MUFL [Call for Papers]. 3 The word ‘state’ from stare, to stand, shares roots with other important words of law, such as ‘statute’ and ‘constitution’ (from statuere, to cause to stand). Moshe Berent notes that it is puzzling that the word στάσις, tied to station or standing and position, should come to mean civil war or strife in Athens. He links part of this explanation to Athens being a stateless society. According to Berent, ‘The egalitarian non-kin nature of Greek society meant that nobody could initiate a stasis or have a political standing by the right of his place in the social hierarchy, because the latter simply did not exist, or was irrelevant’: Moshe Berent, “Stasis, or the Greek Invention of Politics” (1998) 18 History of Political Thought 331 at 353. 4 To be clear: lack of clarity need not be taken to be the prime defect of jurisprudence or of thought more generally; see HLA Hart, “Positivism and the Separation of Law and Morals” (1957) 71 Harv L Rev 593 (‘Holmes was sometimes 1

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Stateless Law

For some, ‘stateless law’ may be an impossibility. These may be followers of Hans Kelsen perhaps, for whom ‘law’ and ‘state’ are identical or are different ways of saying the same.5 More broadly, they may be followers of what Fuller – when writing about, among others, Kelsen – called ‘analytical jurisprudence’, and for whom ‘law’, ‘state’ and ‘sovereign’ are like the members of the ‘trinity’.6 Depending on the tradition of thought to which one belongs, the question of ‘stateless law’ may be, to follow Fuller’s theological analogy, unthinkable, if not heresy. For others, the separation of law and state may accomplish law’s quest for itself (to borrow the phrase from Fuller but give it a positive, fecund, sense). While, if understood in light of Fuller’s criticisms of Kelsen, law’s quest for itself 7 may be illusory and ultimately impossible, law’s quest for itself may also involve its being freed from the shackles of state and sovereign – and not its achievement of splendid analytic and existential isolation. Indeed, stateless law may be more than just one form of law among others; it may be, for lack of a better phrase, lawful law or law proper. And, relatedly, state law may actually be unlawful or improper law and not simply lawless.8 If stateless law is lawful law and state law is unlawful, then the question of stateless law is a very urgent one. At stake in the question of stateless law is not merely the analytical separation of law from state but, rather, the existential renewal of the question of law for its own sake and even the restoration to law of what is proper to it. This restoration may require the undoing of law’s conquest by the state.9 Even if ‘stateless law’ is not utterly unthinkable or heretical, and even if, moreover, stateless law is lawful law, it may be difficult to ‘conceptualize’,10 imagine, experience, actualize. As with many ‘less’ formations, such as ‘fearless’, ‘hopeless’, ‘useless’ and the like, the ‘normal situation’11 is indicated by the word prior to the ‘less’. Ordinary human life is characterized by such things as fear and hope and by involvement in a practical world of things of use.12 The fearless, hopeless, useless and so on point to the exception, if not the exceptional situation. Fearless speech, for example, is the exception and not the norm.13 A hopeless predicament is the exception and not the norm.14 The question mark in the title, on this reading, reinforces the exceptionality of clearly wrong; but again like Austin, when this was so he was always wrong clearly. This surely is a sovereign virtue in jurisprudence’ at 593). See also René Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy, Meditation 3, translated and adapted by Jonathan Bennett, online: Early Modern Texts (‘whatever I perceive very vividly and clearly is true’ at 9).  5 Hans Kelsen, Introduction to the Problems of Legal Theory, translated by Bonnie Litschewski & Stanley L Paulson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992) at 99. Alexander Somek claims that ‘Kelsen’s identity theory amounts, at bottom, to the view all law is, essentially, stateless law’: Alexander Somek, “Stateless Law: Kelsen’s Conception and its Limits” (2005) 26 Oxford J Legal Stud 753 at 755.  6 Lon L Fuller, The Law in Quest of Itself (Chicago: Foundation Press, 1940) at 41.  7 See also Stanley Fish, There’s No Such Thing as Free Speech: And It’s a Good Thing Too (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993) (‘the law does not wish to be absorbed by some other – non legal – structure or concern; the law wishes to be distinct’ at 141).  8 See e.g. Marianne Constable, The Law of the Other: The Mixed Jury and Changing Conceptions of Citizenship, Law and Knowledge (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1994). Constable argues that with state law, law cannot be experienced as ‘proper’ to one: ‘In place of the community’s knowledge of what to do appear sciences of society and government, whose truths inform the judgements of state officials. The community has been turned inside out under a gaze that makes aliens of us all’ (ibid. at 147).  9 Ibid. (‘the moment of conquest captures precisely the acknowledgment of the mark of authority comprising the origin of positive law’ at 84); see also Mark Antaki & Coel Kirkby, “The Lethality of the Canadian State’s (Re)Cognition of Indigenous Peoples” in Austin Sarat & Jennifer L Culbert, States of Violence: War, Capital Punishment and Letting Die (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2009) 192 (where conquest is manifest in the ‘act of cognition’ performed by the Canadian state on Aboriginal peoples, at 199). 10 It may be difficult to ‘conceptualize’ stateless law because speaking and thinking in terms of ‘concepts’, speaking and thinking propositionally, may be to speak and think statically. 11 Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006) at xliv. 12 See Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, translated by John Macquarrie & Edward Robinson (New York: Harper and Row, 1962) (‘[t]he kind of dealing which is closest to us is as we have shown, not a bare perceptual cognition, but rather than kind of concern which manipulates things and puts them to use; and this has its own kind of “knowledge”’ at 95) [Heidegger, Being and Time]. 13 Michel Foucault, Fearless Speech, ed by Joseph Pearson (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2001). 14 On hope as a principle, see Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope, vols 1–3 (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1995).

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‘stateless law’. Of course, the exception may prove to be more interesting, indeed more revealing, than the norm or the rule.15 The French version of the title – equally ‘authoritative’16 (?) but more playful, more telling? – asks to be completed more than the English. Just as the English raises the question of the exceptionality and very possibility of law without the state, a sensible question to ask upon reading – but especially hearing – the French is: hors d’état de quoi? The easiest reading (perhaps reminiscent of the less formation) is to think of ‘hors d’état’ as a form of incapacitation, of rendering impotent, unable to do, as in ‘hors d’état de gouverner’.17 According to this reading, there would be no salvation (for law) without the state as law would be unable to do what it presumably should do, that is direct, without the state, its state. Here, a potential connection between law and monarchy, if not sovereignty, begins to emerge. Do not rulers rule? Is there not a connection between Rex and regulo or regulare? But getting from Rex to state is not necessarily so obvious. We could thus read the title as ‘le droit hors de son état’ – as in the law outside its natural state, displaced (like a refugee?) or besides itself (out of sorts?). Law’s incapacitation, its rendering impotent, its separation from the state, from its own state, might be a good thing. Indeed, rather than putting it ‘hors d’état de gouverner’, separating law from state might be putting law ‘hors d’état de nuire’.18 ‘Nuire’ suggests that law as state law does wrong or causes harm. For instance, Robert Cover famously imagines law without the (violence of the) state as ‘paideic’19 before introducing the state so as to address the violence legal officials and judges do. The physical violence (capital punishment, imprisonment and more) judges command is tied to what Cover calls their ‘jurispathic’ or lawkilling function. (Note the connection between the monopolization of violence and the monopolization of law.) Rather than simply ‘interpret’ law, Cover says, judges kill this law so that that law may live.20 Cover’s thought experiment of subtracting the state from law restores to law its paideic dimension. Indeed, Cover suggests that law might benefit from ‘stepping outside its comfort zone’ of the state so as to make central again the question of the commitments of judges and jurists, commitments which are necessary to justify the violence judges do. Indeed, what if the separation of law and state is not a dis-placement of law, not its rendering impotent, but something like its salvation, its rescue? A less obvious reading would be to think of the ‘état’ in ‘hors d’état’ (note the lower case) as a deficient or problematic state, as in ‘état de famine’21 or even a ‘fallen state’. Theologically, the question might be: what happens when you take a creature – law – out of its natural, that is, fallen state? From a Christian point of view, our natural state is a state of sin. Therefore, to get out of that state, for law to get out of its ‘state’, to transcend it, we or it must be blessed by grace, by the grace of God. In this view, leaving our natural state, law leaving its state, is a good thing because it points to our salvation. Of course, this path reminds one of Augustine and the questions of the relation of temporal authority to spiritual authority as well as the possibility of human perfection in this world, our world.

15 Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006) (‘it would be consequent rationalism to say that the exception proves nothing and that only the normal can be the object of scientific interest. The exception confounds the unity and order of the rationalist scheme’ at 67). 16 See Constitution Act, 1982, ss 56–7, being Schedule B to the Canada Act 1982 (UK), 1982, c 11; Official Languages Act, RSC 1985, c 31 (4th Supp), s 13. 17 See e.g. “Le Premier ministre grec hors d’état de gouverner pour raison de santé”, Libération (25 June 2012), online: Libération . 18 See e.g. Paul Piret, “Hors d’état, l’État belge?” Etudes (March 2012). 19 Παιδεία is usually and roughly translated as ‘education’. In Greek, however, it is etymologically connected to ‘child’ and to ‘play’. 20 Robert M Cover, “The Supreme Court, 1982 Term – Foreword: Nomos and Narrative” (1983) 97 Harv L Rev 68 at 53. 21 See e.g. “Somalie : trois régions hors d’état de famine mais l’urgence humanitaire demeure aiguë”, Acted (18 November 2011), online: Agence d’Aide à la Coopération et au Développement .

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III. Static Conditions As we have seen, the French version of the title, more than the English, raises the question of the state as law’s state, as law’s condition. All of the discussion above was not mere wordplay. As Quentin Skinner reminds us, what we now think of as ‘the state’ is the result of the transformation of the state, the condition, l’état, of something – the state of the realm (status regni), the state of the ruler (status principis) – into ‘the state’ period.22 The prior sense of ‘state’ as ‘condition’ is built into the (rise of the) phenomenon and language of the state. Even if the twelfth-century church, as Harold Berman suggests, was the first ‘state’,23 this linguistic transformation, as Skinner notes,24 took place several hundred years later. Indeed, this linguistic transformation informs how we speak and think and, therefore, is eminently relevant to any pedagogical or existential attempt to subtract the state from law, an attempt which would have to take place in our language. To put the matter differently, our use of ‘state’ and its prominent roles in the language games we play both influence and reflect the forms of life that characterize us and in which we participate.25 Even if the x has dropped out of ‘state of x’ such that we are left with ‘state’ as such, we may also have been left with an enduring question: what kind of state, of condition, is the state? Or, to put it differently, what is the human condition26 of the state, how is the human being conditioned by the state, what ‘human state’ does the state presuppose or produce? This kind of question requires historicizing, in a philosophically sensitive manner, both the state and the ways of human being-in-the-world27 associated with the state, perhaps human being-in-the-state. On the one hand, precisely because it is not a timeless name for political entities, ‘state’ demands to be contrasted with other historically contingent and situated names for polities, such as πόλις.28 For instance, human beings certainly do not experience ‘the state’ as Greek men may have experienced the polis. Polis can be tied to πέλω, to rise in a circular motion (as in pole, as in the pole around which a sphere rotates).29 We do not necessarily experience the state as the existential centre of our world. Benjamin Constant makes this point – about finding and exercising one’s freedom outside of one’s polity – in his De la liberté des Anciens comparée à celle des Modernes.30 On the other hand, of course, we may wish, or need, to see ‘the state’ in places and times in which it has not been named as such. To better grasp both the state and the ways of human being-in-the-world associated with the state, we need to ask questions such as: what is it like to ‘see like a state’,31 to ‘speak like a state’, to ‘think like a state’. 22 Quentin Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, vol 2: The Age of Reformation (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1978) at 353 [Skinner, Foundations]; Americans still speak of the ‘State of the Union Address’. See also Quentin Skinner, “The State” in Terence Ball, James Farr & Russell L Hanson, eds, Political Innovation and Conceptual Change (Cambridge, NY: Cambridge University Press, 1989) 90. 23 Harold J Berman, Law and Revolution: The Formation of the Western Legal Tradition (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1983) (‘the Papal Revolution gave birth to the modern Western state – the first example of which, paradoxically, was the church itself’ at 113). 24 Skinner, Foundations, supra note 22 at 352. 25 In his short pamphlet, L’Etat de guerre (Montreal: Leméac Editeur, 2000) at 45, Jean-Jacques Rousseau plays on ‘Etat’, arguing that a state of war requires states: ‘[C]’est seulement dans l’état social que s’éveillent les passions par lesquelles [l’homme] brave les périls et la mort’. See also David William Bates, States of War: Enlightenment Origins of the Political (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011). 26 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958). 27 See Heidegger, Being and Time, supra note 12. 28 The tendency to use our keywords to label previous ‘polities’ is widespread. See George Liddell & Robert Scott, A Lexicon Abridged from Liddell and Scott’s Greek-English Lexicon (Oxford: Ginn & Co, 1887) at 570–1: ΠΟ´ΛΙΣ … – a city: πόλις ἄκρη, = ἀκρόπολις, the fortress of the city, citadel, which at Athens was sometimes called πόλις, while the rest of the city was called ἄστυ. II. a whole country, state. III. when πόλις and ἄστυ are joined, πόλις is the body of citizens, ἄστυ their dwellings: hence πόλις the state, the citizens who form the state, a free state, republic … . 29 See Martin Heidegger, Parmenides (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992) at 89ff. 30 Benjamin Constant, Oeuvre politique de Benjamin Constant (Paris: Charpentier et cie, 1874) at 260. See also Mark Antaki, “What Does It Mean to Think about Politics?” in Roger Berkowitz, Jeffrey Katz & Thomas Keenan, eds, Thinking in Dark Times: Hannah Arendt on Ethics and Politics (New York: Fordham University Press, 2010) 63 at 66. 31 James C Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (Newhaven, Conn: Yale University Press, 1998).

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James Scott explicitly asks these questions in his marvellous book Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. He writes about what he calls ‘state projects of legibility and simplification’.32 As an example, he uses Prussian and Saxon forestry in the eighteenth century. Such ‘scientific’ forestry radically simplified the forests in order to make them ‘legible’ for persons who would not have to walk through them, thereby transforming ‘nature’ into ‘natural resources’.33 This simplification of the forests to make them legible also allowed for the rewriting of the forests and their transformation into ‘one-commodity machines’.34 Counter-intuitively, modern citizenship itself – and modern citizens – may be a result of this kind of simplification and rewriting.35 This is somewhat paradoxical, since it implies that the transformation of peoples, human beings, into legible populations36 – analogous to the transformation of forests into ‘natural resources’ – comes along with the rise of modern democracy and citizenship.37 Indeed, it is common to hear Québécois politicians refer to ‘the desires of the population’, to ‘consulting the population’ and the like. The demographic category of population, then, often takes the place of democratic categories such as people and citizens.38 While Scott writes about what he calls ‘state projects of legibility and simplification’, perhaps he could have written more pointedly about the state as a project of legibility and simplification. Raison d’état, the reason of the state, then, would be part of a broader story of rationalization,39 of the dominance of the principle of sufficient reason.40 Scott’s subtitle combined with much of his argument suggests that the human condition both envisaged and produced by the state is a ‘failed state’. In seeking to ‘improve’ and master the human condition, the state does violence to it. In addition to asking how the state sees and thinks, in order to better grasp both the state and static ways of human being-in-the-world, we also need to ask questions such as what it is like to ‘feel like a state’. (A strange question indeed. But reason and rationality, too, are moody.) While it is certainly easier to imagine, for example, what it means to see or think like a king rather than what it means to see or think like a state, it seems to be even more difficult to move from feeling like a king to feeling like a state. Do we need to reanthropomorphize something that has been de-anthropomorphized, to coin a term, as it has been personified or corporatized as a legal person? As Pierre Legendre (who, like Berman, locates the phenomenon of the state much earlier than the linguistic rise of the ‘state’) suggests, we must stop seeing (legal) institutions in merely or mostly functional terms and start asking about the kinds of desire they instantiate. ‘[L]es constructions institutionnelles mettent en scène des figurations du désir’, writes Legendre.41 For instance, according to the likes of La Boétie, the state may instantiate human desires for domination and, even more, for submission.42 The state would then be associated with a desire for Herrschaft, domination, 32 Part I of Seeing Like a State (ibid.) bears the title ‘State Projects of Legibility and Simplification’. 33 Ibid. at 11 and 13. 34 Ibid. at 19–20. 35 Ibid. at 32, 70 (on ‘legible and regimented tax payers’). 36 On censuses as a mode of cognition or control, see the account of Aboriginal resistance to censuses in Brian Edward Hubner, “‘This is the Whiteman’s Law’: Aboriginal Resistance, Bureaucratic Change and the Census of Canada, 1830–2006” (2007) 7 Archival Science 195 at 196. 37 Scott, supra note 31 at 13; Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Vintage Books, 1995). ‘[T]he “Enlightenment”, which discovered the liberties, also invented the disciplines’, writes Foucault (ibid. at 222). For him, the paradox resides in the metaphor of ‘the contract … regarded as the ideal foundation of law and political power’ contrasted with the invention of panopticism as a ‘technique, universally widespread, of coercion’ (ibid. at 222). 38 More generally, see Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). 39 See Max Weber, “Science as a Vocation” in H Gerth & CW Mills, eds, From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology (New York: Oxford University Press, 1946) 129 (‘the fate of our times is characterized by rationalization and intellectualization and, above all, by the “disenchantment of the world”’ at 155). 40 See Martin Heidegger, The Principle of Reason (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991) [Heidegger, Principle of Reason] (‘[t]he calculability of objects presupposes the unqualified validity of the principium rationis. It is in this way that the authority characteristic of the principle of reason determines the essence of the modern technological age’ at 121). 41 Pierre Legendre, Leçons VII: Le désir politique de Dieu. Etude sur les montages de l’Etat et du Droit (Paris: Fayard, 1988) at 27. 42 See Pierre Clastres, “Liberté, malencontre, innommable” in Etienne de La Boétie, Le discours de la servitude volontaire (Paris: Payot, 1976) 229.

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lordship, authority or, as medievalist Thomas N. Bisson puts it, with the earlier experience of men on horses.43 One could not, then, separate the sociological idea of Herrschaft, no matter how impersonal, from the experience of being, or the desire to be, a Herr.44 To feel like a state is to feel domination. Pierre Clastres’s political anthropology of so-called primitive societies emphasizes that they are societies without a state, societies against the state, precisely because these societies actively resist(ed) the drives or desires for command and obedience, for domination and submission.45 The so-called taming of the state and its power by the rule of law would not necessarily escape this (now institutionalized) desire. Precisely because the state and its law constitute our state,46 separating law from state is no easy matter, but rather, a very difficult existential task. Legendre invites us to consider ‘state, status, in the manner defined by Thomas Aquinas, according to a well-known medieval metaphor, like the position of the body’.47 The ‘state’, he says, is the equivalent of the scholastic ‘homo rectus’, a man who stands ‘debout’, upright, straight, droit, Recht.48 What we call ‘law’, he writes, ‘in this case under the aegis of the vague term state’, is just one possible position, just like the positions of the human body.49 More than simply a metaphor, Legendre suggests, however, the body is an important question in its own right. Experiencing, enacting, performing stateless law may imply, require, a repositioning of our bodies and of the body of law. This is crucial because what ostensibly succeeds ‘the state’ may differ only in name but not in ‘state’ or condition. For example, Legendre suggests that ‘Management’ (often coming along with globalization) is essentially continuous with a Western tradition of the ‘non-somatic’, that is, non-bodily interpretation of texts.50 This of course raises the question of where we might find the body, the corpus, of law and where we might find our own bodies in the body of law. Is stateless law, then, embodied law, bodily law? IV. Static Disciplines It would have been customary to have a subtitle such as ‘the state of the discipline’. Perhaps that was too much of a mouthful so we have the ‘future of the discipline’ instead. In any case, envisaging the ‘future of the discipline’ usually requires examining its past and present ‘states’. Moreover, the subtitle suggests the possibility or raises the question of the ‘normalization’ of a previously exceptional state, a stateless state, that is, the state of stateless law. In the call for papers, this ‘future’ is to be understood in light of jurists (including or especially law teachers) ‘being forced to abandon, at least in part, the posited law of the nation state as their lode star’.51 There is a kind of holding on here, a tentativeness, perhaps a curtailing or repressing, of the ambition of stateless law. This tentativeness is manifest in at least two ways. First, it is manifest in the choice of ‘being forced to abandon’, to jump ship as it were, or to choose exile. Second, the law to be abandoned is not, properly speaking, ‘state law’ but the ‘posited law of the nation state’.52 Overcoming ‘centuries of legal nationalism’53 may be much less radical than overcoming the condition of state law. Here, the body of the call for papers accentuates the 43 Thomas N Bisson, The Crisis of the Twelfth Century: Power, Lordship, and the Origins of European Government (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008) at 6. 44 Max Weber, Economy and Society (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978) at 213; see also Mark Antaki, “Domination” in Mark Bevir, ed, Encyclopedia of Political Theory, vol 1: A-E (Thousand Oaks, California: SAGE Publications, 2010) at 400. 45 Pierre Clastres, “Of Torture in Primitive Societies” in Society Against the State: Essays in Political Anthropology (New York: Zone, 1987) 177 (the memory acquired in pain says, ‘You will not have the desire for power; you will not have the desire for submission’ at 188). 46 C.f. Wystan Hugh Auden, “Law Like Love” in Edward Mendelson, ed, Collected Poems: Auden (New York: Vintage Books, 1991) at 262–4. 47 Legendre, supra note 41 at 237 [translated by author]. 48 Ibid. at 237; see also ibid. at 52. 49 Ibid. at 237. The broader context of Legendre’s discussion is public and private as positions of Roman law. 50 Ibid. at 85. 51 Call for Papers, supra note 2. 52 Ibid. 53 Ibid.

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ambiguous performance of the title. What is more, the anxiety regarding being stateless (a horrible fate for a human being in today’s world)54 is reproduced with regard to law ‘preserving’ its ‘disciplinary identity’.55 But does the loss of the state necessarily lead to the loss of law? What undisciplining does ‘going stateless’ require and why or how is such going stateless to be feared? Is the fear of this undisciplining tied to the fear of having to think differently or to a fear of loss of status or power or both? Of course, ‘being forced to abandon’ something may lead to opportunities. For instance, we find an opportunity for ‘new, transdisciplinary and transnational ways of thinking about law’.56 This choice of words is noteworthy. The call for papers uses, celebrates, the language of ‘the new’, of what is ‘innovative’. It is decidedly ‘modern’ (in German, modernity is Neuzeit, the ‘new time’, and when we say something is fashionable, à la mode, we are referring back to the Latin modo). And yet, it would seem that the easiest place to go to recover the possibility of ‘statelessness’, to perform the existential operation of subtraction, would be the past.57 The call for papers’ allusions to globalization and the like point more to a decentring of state law, that is, the posited laws of the nation-state, than to a past of properly stateless law. It is as if stateless law must be a new response to a new epoch. All of this is important as it points to the kind of ‘transcendence’, of stepping over and across, that the call for papers implicitly evokes in its allusions to ‘transdisciplinarity’ and ‘transnationalism’. Are these ‘transcendences’58 that preserve what they are stepping over and across – the state and modern understandings and attitudes – and how so? It is often said that a legal education that decentres the posited law of the nation-state necessarily leads, or ought to lead, to more or better inter- or transdisciplinarity.59 However, too often, all disciplines other than ‘law’ are lumped together. Too often, we find the catch-all phrase of the ‘social sciences and humanities’. And, too often, we find references to law reaching out towards other disciplines without any raising of the possibility that (modern) law and these ‘other’ disciplines are already historically and existentially linked. The so-called fragmentation of the life world60 and the concomitant rise of specialized knowledges do not mean the fragments are not rather similar. A modern-day jurist reaching out towards a modern-day sociologist is not necessarily a move from a human being who has been disciplined in one way to a human being who has been disciplined in a radically or interestingly different way. This is important because of the link between the state and discipline. The state itself, and the human condition that comes along with it, are the result of what we may call a ‘disciplining process’.61 Moreover, while the characterization of law as a ‘discipline’ preceded the state – after all, discipline is tied to learning62 – the state itself is associated with the rise of discipline, of specific kinds of discipline, of specific disciplines. 54 Hannah Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Meridian, 1962) at 267: Civil wars … were followed by migrations of groups who … were welcomed nowhere and could be assimilated nowhere. Once they had left their homeland they remained homeless, once they had left their state they became stateless; once they had been deprived of their human rights they were rightless, the scum of the earth. 55 Call for Papers, supra note 2. 56 Ibid. 57 See Mark Antaki, “The Turn to Imagination in Legal Theory” (2012) 23 Law and Critique 1 at 13 (where I suggest that some ‘nostalgics’ believe that proper recollection and care for the past makes a future possible). 58 Richard Janda, “Toward Cosmopolitan Law” (2005) 50 McGill LJ 967 (‘[i]n this new relationship between law and philosophy, the jurist is no longer labouring to derive particular norms from philosophy’s universal maxims. Law lends right to philosophy and philosophy lends transcendence to law: hence transsystemic law’ at 976). 59 Roderick Macdonald, “Transdisciplinarity and Trust” in Margaret A Somerville & David J Rapport, eds, Transdisciplinarity: reCreating Integrated Knowledge (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s Press, 2002) 61 (‘[t]ransdisciplinarity is not the bridging of existing disciplines; it is their transcendence by a new epistemology’ at 69). See also Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, Law and Learning / Le droit et le savoir: Report of the Consultative Group on Research and Education in Law (Ottawa: SSHRC, 1983) at 58; this report suggests that the separation of law faculties from arts, humanities and social sciences faculties is arbitrary. 60 Jürgen Habermas, “Modernity: An Unfinished Project” in Maurizio Passerin d’Entrèves and Seyla Banhabib, eds, Habermas and the Unfinished Project of Modernity (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1997) 38 at 44–50. 61 Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2000) at 52. Writing about Erasmus’ treatise on good manners, Elias describes the progressive control acquired on movements and bodily functions as a form of ‘possession’. 62 Discipline comes from Latin disciplina, ‘instruction, knowledge’, from discipulus. The Oxford English Dictionary, 2d ed, sub verbo “discipline”.

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Indeed, the rise of the state, of the ‘modern’ state, may be intimately bound up with very specific ways of knowing, that is, with the rise of the social sciences.63 In his tribute to Pierre Clastres, Christian Coulon refers to ‘[l]es difficultés des sciences sociales à appréhender la société en dehors des catégories et le langage de l’Etat’64 and adds that Clastres wanted to discover ‘the conditions of the possibility of the state’s death’.65 To think about stateless law, to existentially subtract the state from law, may signify not simply the embrace of more discipline, more disciplines, but rather, the subtraction of some disciplines, the reversal of at least some disciplining processes, of which we must then, perforce, become aware. What is more, in Max Weber’s language, stateless law may require, come along with, the experience of enchantment and, moreover, demand an experience of derationalization. It would require dethroning or rethinking the principle of reason, nihil est sine ratione, as the first principle of being,66 a first principle that, by way of Leibniz, underlies the scientific project of codification and modern law more generally.67 Of course, this may involve a radical rethinking or re-experiencing of both judgment and justification, which ostensibly involve the finding and giving of reasons (justification as the provision of a ground, a ratio).68 In the so-called discipline of law, the reversal of a disciplining process tied to legal nationalism and the centrality of the posited law of the nation-state goes, in part at least, by the name of the critique of legal positivism. However, critiques of legal positivism necessarily fail when they wittingly or unwittingly take the form or model of state law and simply assert that this kind of ‘law’ is to be found elsewhere, outside the state. Breaking up the monopoly of the state on law, and its ‘legitimate’ violence, does not, in itself, change the character of what is, or is not, monopolized. So, to say that not all rules emanate from the state or are ‘validated’ in or through the state does not confront the belief that law properly resides in rules or that validity is the mode of being of law proper.69 How radically are we willing or able to change our language games when we attempt to subtract state from law or, rather, let go of the addition of state to law? Is it only, perhaps, with a radical change in our language games, that we can glimpse, taste, begin to live out different forms of life70 to our own?71 A radical critique of legal positivism must also be a critique of positivism more fundamentally. And whatever ‘progress’ has been made in this regard in the social sciences, the horizon of the state, the condition of the state and the discipline of the state make social-scientific positivism, which appears in many guises 63 See Peter Wagner et al, Social Sciences and Modern States: National Experiences and Theoretical Crossroads (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1991). In Sweden, for example, a government commission was established early in the twentieth century to deal with immigration problems, which led to the academic discipline of statistics (ibid. at 6). 64 Christian Coulon, “La pensée en contre-pente de Pierre Clastres” in Département d’anthropologie sociale/ Ethnologie, Centre d’Etudes et de Recherches Ethnologiques, L’anti-autoritarisme en ethnologie : actes du colloque du 13 avril 1995, Mémoires des Cahiers Ethnologiques No 8 (Bordeaux: Presses de l’Université de Bordeaux, 1997) 109 at 115. 65 Ibid [translated by author]. 66 Heidegger, Principle of Reason, supra note 40. 67 Roger Berkowitz, The Gift of Science: Leibniz and the Modern Legal Tradition (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2005) at 1. 68 Elias, The Civilizing Process, supra note 61 (‘what we refer to by the reifying terms “reason”, “ratio” or “understanding” … expresses a particular moulding which takes place very gradually, repeatedly advancing and slipping back’ at 402). He adds: ‘there is not actually a ratio, there is at most “rationalization”’ (ibid. at 403). See also Mark Antaki, “The Rationalism of Proportionality’s Culture of Justification” in Grant Huscroft, Bradley W Miller & Grégoire Webber, eds, Proportionality and the Rule of Law: Rights, Justification, Reasoning (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2014) 284; Linda Meyer, Justice of Mercy (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2010) (‘what if reason is not the ground of community or the essence of being human?’ at 26). 69 See Marianne Constable, supra note 8 (showing the contingency of law as rules: ‘[t]he community’s stance towards “its own rules” consists in the members’ shared knowledge of how to act, a practical knowledge that need not to be formulated as statements of rules or as propositional knowledge’ at 87). 70 Ludwig Wittgenstein, supra note 1 at aphorism 19. Learning to play differently is a necessary part of re-educating oneself. The phenomenological connection between children, play and education is there etymologically in the Greek. 71 The theme of otherness or difference has been omnipresent in discussion of the McGill programme. See e.g. Yves‐Marie Morissette, “McGill’s Integrated Civil and Common Law Program” (2002) 52 J Legal Educ 12 at 22; Helge Dedek & Armand de Mestral, “Born to be Wild: The ‘Trans-systemic’ Programme at McGill and the De-Nationalization of Legal Education” (2009) 10 German Law Journal 889 (referring to ‘the omnipresent experience of difference’ at 905).

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and often with a less offensive label, very difficult to escape. For we live and breathe72 the state. For instance, any legal critique of ‘sovereignty’ must be undertaken in conjunction with a more radical critique of the human faculty or capacity of ‘the will’, which of course means that such a project will cut across many areas of modern law and life.73 Moreover, any radical critique of state law will have to call into question not only the idea that law resides in rules, but also an understanding and experience of language as primarily propositional,74 and as an instrument of communication more than a manner of both being-in-the-world and of world-disclosure.75 Only such a critique, it seems to me, would come close to making room for Aboriginal legal traditions in a legal curriculum.76 To become strangers to ourselves,77 to experience statelessness, we may need to confront our deepseated rationalisms and not simply our legal nationalisms. Clastres once remarked that ‘[t]here is in primitive societies a respect for language that does not exist elsewhere’.78 We may have to recover that respect for language, not as ratio but as logos or even as muthos, and the experience of language that comes along with it if we are to call into question legal positivism and the more fundamental positivism that underlies it. Only then can we start to think of law for its own sake, that is, for our sake.

72 Perhaps we even worship it. See Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2006) (‘[i]t will give you everything if you worship it, the new idol’ at 35). 73 For instance, James Gordley uses contract law as an example but also refers by name to tort law and criminal law. See James Gordley, Philosophical Origins of Modern Contract Doctrine (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991) at 9. 74 See Marianne Constable, supra note 8 (‘the reduction of rules to propositional writing means that just as knowledge of law becomes a matter of propositions rather than practices, so too does knowledge of history become a matter of fact rather than tradition’ at 94–5). Constable notes this understanding of language in the way we formulate history: ‘factual accounts of history point continually to the origin of law in moments of conquest that can never be located at determinate points in time’ (ibid. at 94). For her, turning away from propositional knowledge of law and history transforms the latter into a narrative, ‘a tale not of facts, of what exists and has existed looking back, but of who we are’ (ibid. at 95). 75 Nikolas Kompridis, Critique and Disclosure: Critical Theory between Past and Future (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 2006) (‘rather than steering the phenomena and practices of world disclosure into a sphere remote from everyday life, critical theorists need to conceive of everyday life and practice differently’ at 113). 76 Kirsten Anker, “Teaching ‘Indigenous Peoples and the Law’: Whose Law?” (2008) 33 Alternative Law Journal 132 at 134. 77 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Genealogy of Morals (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 2000) at 1 (Preface); Julia Kristeva, Strangers to Ourselves (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991). 78 “Entretien avec Pierre Clastres” (1975) 9 L’Anti-mythes 21 [translated by author].

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Chapter 10

The Study of Legal Plurality outside ‘Legal Pluralism’: The Future of the Discipline?

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Maxime St-Hilaire*

I. Introduction The study of the plurality of legal orders must abandon the pluralist ‘paradigm’.1 It is at best superfluous; at worst, it is confused. The first contention concerns legal pluralism as a descriptive approach to law and does not mean that all the claims of legal pluralism are wrong, but that they are poorly made by this socalled paradigm. The second concerns legal pluralism as a normative approach. The best statement of the first critique belongs to Tamanaha (Section II), who demonstrates the absence of anything even approaching an agreement within pluralism regarding the notion of law or legal order, a flaw that leaves pluralism vulnerable to being criticized as panjuridicism. As for the second critique, it has been barely sketched out by a handful of scholars, among them Waldron. Yet pluralism can above all be explained as a political attitude, which defines its claims and arguments so poorly that one may suspect it of being an aesthetic position. More often than not, its proponents fall into performative contradiction by, without further nuance, claiming at the same time to adhere to the Rule of Law, whose formal control principle includes an ineradicable core of legal and judicial monism (Section IV). This is because the political stance of legal pluralism is generally inexplicit and undefended. Much more than an instructive example of this is the epitomic Romano, with whom every discussion on legal pluralism should start. I have decided, however, to start with sources more familiar to my expected reader, all the better to allow a careful examination of Romano’s canonical work, supplemented by minimum intellectual-biographical information, to show perfectly the shift from front-science to hidden or unconfessed political agenda. One has to choose between Romano’s two main theoretical and, as a matter of fact, pluralist theses – those of law as fact and of ‘relevance’ as a fruitful concept of legal relationships between legal orders. More exactly, the second thesis, which is more specific, refutes the first, which – properly understood as an argument against Kelsen – was meant to be the foundation of legal pluralism. My claim is that this has to be taken as symptomatic (Section III). II. Tamanaha: Legal Pluralism as a Problematic Paradigm According to Sally Engle Merry, legal pluralism is ‘generally defined as a situation in which two or more legal systems coexist in the same social field’.2 In Jeremy Waldron’s words, ‘“Legal pluralism” is a term used mostly to describe and characterise the existence of several distinct legal systems, or perhaps legal subsystems, within a single independent political community, like a nation-state’.3 Both definitions share the idea of a coexistence of legal orders. The former raises the question of what ‘social field’ means; the second, that of the meaning of the expression ‘independent political community’ other than the state. The latter definition also * Translation by Léonid Sirota, LL.B./B.C.L., McGill; J.S.D. Candidate, NYU. I am grateful to my colleagues Finn Makela and Derek McKee as well as to the anonymous reviewer for their valuable comments and suggestions. 1 I cannot here systematically unpack the phrase ‘legal pluralism’ in full. Nevertheless, the reader should certainly not confuse it with the axiological pluralism of political philosophy. 2 Sally Engle Merry, “Legal Pluralism” (1988) 22 Law & Soc’y Rev 869 at 870. 3 Jeremy Waldron, “Legal Pluralism and the Contrast Between Hart’s Jurisprudence and Fuller’s” in Peter Crane, ed, The Hart-Fuller Debate in the Twenty-First Century (Oxford: Hart, 2010) 135 at 136 [Waldron, “Legal Pluralism”]. 1

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presupposes that existing legal orders can be hierarchically arranged – a hypothesis which, as we shall see, the adherents of legal pluralism attribute to a ‘weak’ version of this doctrine. But, surely, and more fundamentally, both pose the question of what a ‘legal system’ is. According to some scholars, the source of legal pluralism is to be found in ethnology. The notion is said to have truly come into being in the work of the Dutch school of customary law (Adat Law School) directed by Cornelius van Vollenhoven at the beginning of the last century, which studied the law of the indigenous peoples of Indonesia colonized by the Netherlands.4 Yet at the time, the notion of legal pluralism seemed mostly to refer to the possibility of the existence of law in societies not organized as states. Only in the 1930s was the analytical framework of ‘global’, ‘societal’ or ‘political’ cultures applied to the various social groups that form part of industrialized societies. That was what Norbert Rouland, in whose opinion theories of legal pluralism served to unite legal anthropologists,5 called the passage from legal ethnology to legal anthropology.6 Yet as early as 1922, a jurist who was then rather a stranger to anthropology and sociology, Eugen Ehrlich, wrote that ‘[t]he great mass of law which originates with social institutions comes into being and develops, not as one might suppose, only in primitive times, but also in the living present as the natural offspring of society itself’.7 Later on, as Jean-Guy Belley points out, some legal sociologists, including Georges Gurvitch, distinguished themselves by ‘their emphasis on making the notion of legal pluralism the very basis of their discipline’.8 In his overview, written in 1986, Belley explained how the sociology of formal organizations and the anthropology of the modes of dispute resolution, above all, were the source of a renewal of interest in the idea of legal pluralism between 1960 and 1980;9 so too was the ‘governance’ paradigm.10 Be that as it may, at present, an entire current of legal anthropology and of sociology of law is based on the idea that to a plurality of social groups there can correspond a plurality of legal orders. This concerns the ‘social field’, or ‘independent political community’, an element of the above definitions, the idea being that nowadays legal pluralism is not only about the possible existence of law in non-state-organized political communities, but also about the possible existence of non-state legal systems parallel to that of the state. As for the ‘legal system’ element of those same definitions, things get more complicated. Legal positivism has generally preferred the formal criterion of authorship, ultimately that of the state, to the substantive criterion of the content of the norm to determine the norm’s legal character. Legal pluralism objects to this normative, statist and monist positivism, which it regards as some formalist resurgence of ‘jusnaturalism’, that is, the measuring of the validity of the law according to its form rather than its substance. It thus seeks to raise the law and the state from the ruins of their conceptual association by replacing the latter with the idea of social control. And yet, untethered from the state, law as an object of allegedly scientific study has proven quite elusive. Within legal pluralism, one is at sea, hypothesizing in a vague empiricism. In discussing ‘the legality of the anthropologists’, Louis Assier-Andrieu suggests that, whatever its scope, the fluid notion of social control ultimately destroys the crucial problem of law’s specificity, which becomes ‘dissolved in a uniform vision of power relations and symbolic structures capable of producing normalized behaviour’.11 He concludes that such conceptual indeterminacy leads ‘either to tautologies that can hardly work outside the thought of their authors, or to other problems, neglecting the question of law in order to grasp the whole constellation of the norms that order social life’.12 Insofar as law is defined as exercising a social  4 See e.g. M Alliot, “L’anthropologie juridique et le droit des manuels” (1983) 24 ARSP 71.  5 Norbert Rouland, “Anthropologie juridique” in Denis Alland & Stéphane Rials, eds, Dictionnaire de la culture juridique (Paris: Lamy/Presses Universitaires de France, 2003) 63.  6 Norbert Rouland, Anthropologie juridique (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1988).  7 Eugen Ehrlich, “The Sociology of Law” (1922) 36 Harv L Rev 129 at 144.  8 J-G Belley, “Pluralisme juridique” in André-Jacques Arnaud et al, eds, Dictionnaire encyclopédique de théorie et de sociologie du droit, 2d ed (Paris: LGDJ, 1993) 446 [translated by Léonid Sirota] [Belley, “Pluralisme juridique”].  9 J-G Belley, “L’Etat et la régulation juridique des sociétés globales: Pour une problématique du pluralisme juridique” (1986) 13 Sociologie et sociétés 11. 10 See especially the excellent note by Thibault Le Texier, “Gouvernance” (2009) in V Bourdeau & R Merrill, eds, DicoPo: Dictionnaire de théorie politique, online: DicoPo . 11 Louis Assier-Andrieu, “Le juridique des anthropologues” (1987) 5 Dr et Soc 89 at 96 [translated by Léonid Sirota]. 12 Ibid.

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control function, it becomes necessary to ‘ask questions about the conditions in which the legal mode of social control arises among the other available means to the same end’.13 In any case, the conceptual vagueness surrounding plural legalities is in no way limited to the legality of anthropologists; it is, no doubt, within the pluralism which claims, sometimes more and sometimes less credibly, to belong to legal sociology that the legal eclipse becomes total. Let us illustrate this with a few examples. Santos defines law as ‘a body of regularized procedures and normative standards, considered justiciable in any given group, which contributes to the creation and prevention of disputes, and to their settlement through an argumentative discourse, coupled with the threat of force’, acknowledging at once that this definition, should it be applied unthinkingly, ‘could easily lead to the total trivialization of law’.14 He therefore introduces an external limitation – his theory of ‘six structural clusters of social relations in capitalist societies integrating the world system’: (1) ‘domestic law’, (2) ‘production law’, (3) ‘exchange law’, (4) ‘community law’, (5) ‘territorial law or state law’, and (6) (global) ‘systemic law’.15 Yet this limitation is unworkable, due especially to the vagueness of the idea of community law. Santos himself is aware of this, anticipating the objection: ‘It may be asked: why should these competing or complementary forms of social ordering be designated as law and not rather as “rule systems”, “private governments”, and so on? Posed in these terms, this question can only be answered by another question: Why not?’16 Still in the realm of sociology, systems theory did not endorse legal pluralism before Teubner. Borrowing Luhmann’s conception of law as social system and his conception of the social system as a set of communication operations, he comes to a definition of legal pluralism ‘no longer as a set of conflicting social norms in a given social field but as a multiplicity of diverse communicative processes that observe social action under the binary code of legal/illegal’.17 In his view, The multiple of orders of legal pluralism always produce normative expectations, excluding, however, merely social conventions and moral norms since they are not based on the binary code legal/illegal. And they may serve many functions: social control, conflict regulation, reaffirmation of expectations, social regulation, coordination of behavior or the disciplining of bodies and souls. It is neither structure nor function but the binary code which defines what is the ‘legal proprium’ in local or global legal pluralism.18

Yet does this substitution not lead us back to that starting point of analysis which Hart described, despite the generally unproblematic usage of the words ‘law’, ‘legal’, etc., as a need to ‘advance legal theory’19 due to ‘aspects of law which seem naturally, at all times, to give rise to misunderstanding, so that confusion and a consequent need for greater clarity about them may coexist even in the minds of thoughtful men with a firm mastery and knowledge of the law’?20 In an even more plainly anti-theoretical posture, Brian Tamanaha charges theories of legal pluralism in general with being a futile and misleading ‘relabelling’. Arguing that ‘Teubner’s approach to law contains a tension grounded in the fact that he relies upon conventionalism to identify law – law is whatever people code as law – while at the same time having a function-based view of the relationship between law and society’,21 he thus criticizes Teubner for failing to turn to ‘convention’, as the 13 Ibid. at 95. 14 Boaventura de Sousa Santos, Toward a New Common Sense: Law, Science, and Politics in the Paradigmatic Transition (New York: Routledge, 1995) at 428–9. 15 Ibid. at 429–36. 16 Ibid. at 115. 17 Gunther Teubner, “Global Bukowina: Legal Pluralism in the World Society” in Gunther Teubner, ed, Global Law without a State (Brookfield, VT: Dartmouth, 1996) 3 at 14 [Teubner, “Global Bukowina”]. 18 Ibid. at 15. 19 HLA Hart, The Concept of Law, 2d ed (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994) at 17 [Hart, Concept of Law]. 20 Ibid. at 6. For Hart, those ‘aspects’ were, in the form of ‘issues’, the following three: ‘How does law differ from and how is it related to orders backed by threats? How does legal obligation differ from, and how is it related to, moral obligation? What are rules and to what extent is law an affair of rules?’ (ibid. at 13). 21 Brian Z Tamanaha, A General Jurisprudence of Law and Society (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001) (‘[b] eneath the surface, Teubner’s approach to law contains a tension grounded in the fact that he relies upon conventionalism to identify law – law is whatever people code as law – while at the same time having a function-based view of the relationship between law and society’ at 188) [Tamanaha, General Jurisprudence].

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resolution of the mystery of legality would require. To the ‘counter-intuitive assertion that much of social life is law’, he prefers ‘the uncontroversial assertion that rule systems are pervasive in social life’.22 In its strongest versions, legal pluralism tends not only towards panjuridicism, but also towards a sort of levelling of the different laws which it claims to uncover. Regarding his own legal theory, Teubner insists that it is ‘in no way a view of “legal centralism”. It refutes categorically any claim that the official law of the nation-states, of the United Nations or of international institutions enjoy any hierarchically superior position. It creates instead the imagery of a hierarchy of diverse legal discourses’.23 Claiming to rely on Gurvitch’s work, in addition to John Griffiths’s famous article,24 Belley contrasts a weak legal pluralism, according to which ‘the law’s diversity is ultimately subject to a central and hierarchical integration effected by a more or less legitimate power’, with a strong legal pluralism ‘emphasizing a decentralized regime of fluctuating, perhaps even chaotic, interactions between legal orders simultaneously engaged in practices of autonomy and interdependence’.25 Yet, as Evelyne Serverin clearly shows, Belley’s reading of Gurvitch mistakenly ‘situates on a single local level legal orders which Gurvitch located at different levels of society [in accordance with his general sociology of levels of depth]’.26 This matters, since here the radicalism, or radicalization, of the pluralist paradigm comes at the price of a misreading of an author called upon as an authority, something that normally raises doubt. Tamanaha’s solution to the general problem of legal pluralism – which he labels ‘conventionalism’ and presents as a form of ‘non-essentialism’ – is to begin by relying as much as possible on practice, even if this makes it necessary to begin the analysis anew on the basis of more raw or ‘pure’ data, less corrupted by conceptual priors. On this view, law is ‘whatever people identify and treat through their social practices as “law” (or droit, [R]echt, etc.)’.27 That is the gist of his criticism of Teubner28 and of Hart,29 calling for an 22 Ibid. at 185: Indeed, what are the benefits of squeezing together all of the following under the rubric ‘law’: the sedimented social relations within the household, the ‘law’ of the corporation, the regulations and normative standards that rule the everyday life of wage labour relations, the ‘law’ of the marketplace, the rules invoked by hegemonic or oppressed groups or by imperial aggressive identities, the ‘legal’ form of the worldplace, state law, and much more? In their various and complex manifestations, these phenomena are far more unlike than alike one another. The one – narrow but fundamental – characteristic these myriad phenomena share is that they involve rules. This common element is captured most precisely by calling them rule systems, with the concomitant assertion that social arenas are characterized by rule system pluralism. No information is lost in this formulation because being involved with rules is exactly what they have in common [emphasis in original]. See also Brian Tamanaha, “The Folly of the ‘Social Scientific’ Concept of Legal Pluralism” (1993) 20 JL & Soc’y 192 at 212: The legal pluralist attachment of the word ‘law’ to lived systems of normative order adds no information, and generates resistance and confusion. Consider instead substituting the words ‘rule system’ for the word ‘legal’, a move which immediately discharges the baggage carried by the term ‘law’, and frees ‘rule system’ pluralists to define their concept in a way which matches the phenomenon they wish to capture. … [L]egal pluralists must stop charging those who hold this view of law [as the law of the state] with suffering from ideologicallyinduced blindness. 23 Teubner, “Global Bukowina”, supra note 17 at 15. 24 John Griffiths, “What is Legal Pluralism?” (1986) 24 J Legal Pluralism 1. 25 J-G Belley, “Le droit comme terra incognita : conquérir et construire le pluralisme juridique” (1997) 12 CJLS 1 at 5–6 [translated by Léonid Sirota] [Belley, Terra incognita]. 26 Evelyne Serverin, Sociologie du droit (Paris: La Découverte, 2000) at 67 [translated by Léonid Sirota]. See also Georges Gurvitch, L’Expérience juridique et la Philosophie pluraliste du droit (Liège, Paris; G Thone, A Pedone, 1935); Georges Gurvitch, Eléments de sociologie juridique (Paris: Aubier, 1940); Georges Gurvitch, La vocation actuelle de la sociologie (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1950); J-C Marcel, “Georges Gurvitch: les raisons d’un succès” (2001) 110 Cahiers internationaux de sociologie 97. 27 Brian Z Tamanaha, “Socio-Legal Positivism and a General Jurisprudence” (2001) 21 Oxford J Legal Stud 1 at 27 [Tamanaha, “Socio-Legal Positivism”]: a non-essentialist concept of law … requires that law be conceived in a way that is empty, or that at least does not presuppose any particular content or nature. But that is impossible – a concept with no content is not a concept at all. Formulating a concept of law, therefore, will not work. Instead what is needed is a way to identify law that is not itself a concept of law, but rather, like Teubner’s approach, the specification of criteria for the identification of law. 28 See Tamanaha, General Jurisprudence, supra note 21 and accompanying text. 29 Tamanaha, “Socio-Legal Positivism”, supra note 27.

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abandonment of the ‘quest for the Holy Grail’ that is the search for the concept of law.30 He proposes that this search be replaced by a two-step process of identification: (1) a description of the practice, followed by (2) the development, not of a concept of law, but of categories of law (in other words of a typology of legal phenomena), as well as of additional concepts related to the properties of these categories.31 In order to avoid, at the first stage, limiting the study otherwise than ‘quantitatively’, Tamanaha suggests that the delineation of a ‘social arena’ chosen as the object of study must only be subject to the requirements of clarity and coherence.32 The Hartian ‘concept of law’ is only one category of law among many.33 It may well be necessary to make room for categories of law not captured by the Hartian concept of law as a system of primary and secondary rules that regulates a certain range of conduct and is generally effective in doing so. However, if that were the case, one might well question the fruitfulness of Tamanaha’s methodology, the empiricism of whose first stage strikes me as equally improbable and radical, if only because of linguistic diversity, which means that finding an equivalent to the word ‘law’ is often by no means obvious. How are we to determine whether, in any given case, a linguistic practice can or cannot be considered to be equivalent to the use of the word ‘law’? Here too, the move to the second methodological stage makes it difficult to clearly distinguish Tamanaha’s approach from Hart’s. Starting from a smaller ‘social arena’ and a far less problematic, even unproblematic, usage, the latter did not aim to forge some definition – ‘in the sense of a rule by reference to which the correctness of the use of the word can be tested’34 – but (at most) a concept of law. Now, and from a different starting point, Tamanaha calls for something even more modest than a (single) concept of law, that is, (multiple) categories of law, along with their related concepts. In what manner does this distinguish itself from Hart’s need to theoretically clarify some confusing aspects of the phenomenon referred to by the generally unproblematic usage of the word ‘law’– other than the fact that here we are dealing with diverse anticipated usages and corresponding phenomena? Would not a stronger objection have been to ask Hart’s model: ‘Within that same “social arena”, is it true that usage of the word “law” generally is not problematic?’ As for Tamanaha, one is tempted to ask him, ‘But what sense does it make, other than lexicographical, to completely respond to usage so as to recognize the need for a multiplicity of categories of law without having some logically preceding concept of law?’ I agree with Emmanuel Melissaris on the specific point that ‘[c]ritical, post-modern theories of legal pluralism … deny the possibility of saying anything meaningful about the concept of law and collapse the latter into all other kinds of normativity as well as forms of social control’.35 Not only is this a problem on the descriptive register, but also on the normative one, given that, as this chapter aims to argue, contemporary legal pluralism conflates both. The ambiguity of its concept of law aside, pluralism can nevertheless seem to make a significant contribution to the effort of understanding the ways in which legal orders can interact with one another. Jean Carbonnier argues that the entire set of phenomena consisting of ‘the relationships that develop and decay between two categories, orders or systems of norms’ can be grasped through the idea of ‘internormativity’.36 30 Tamanaha, General Jurisprudence, supra note 21 at 175. 31 Ibid. at 193–4. See also Tamanaha, “Socio-Legal Positivism”, supra note 27 at 31: The danger is not only that we might be comparing apples and oranges, but that the inconsistencies of usage may give rise to categories with members sharing little in common. Socio-legal positivism avoids this problem by resorting to conventionalism to identify the existence of law, and the content of legal norms, but not to create categories of kinds of law, or a typology of legal phenomena. Usage cannot dictate the construction of analytical categories or appoint their membership. Typologies and categories are analytical devices that are designed to meet the purposes of the theoretician who constructs them. In this case, they must be formulated by the legal theorist following an investigation of the various social practices and phenomena to which convention attaches the name ‘law’. These phenomena can be abstracted from and their distinctive features identified, then placed into broader categories based upon complexes of shared features. 32 Tamanaha, General Jurisprudence, supra note 21 at 206–8. 33 Tamanaha, “Socio-Legal Positivism”, supra note 27 (‘Hart has already elaborated on the key elements of one of these categories; the others have yet to be constructed’ at 31). 34 Hart, Concept of Law, supra note 19 at 17. 35 Emmanuel Melissaris, Ubiquitous Law: Legal Theory and the Space for Legal Pluralism (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2009) at 43. 36 Jean Carbonnier, “Internormativité” in André-Jacques Arnaud et al, eds, Dictionnaire encyclopédique de théorie et de sociologie du droit, 2d ed (Paris: LGDJ, 1993) at 313; see also Jean Carbonnier, “Les phénomènes d’internormativité”

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And the reason Belley says that Santi Romano is ‘probably the one who made the most progress towards clarifying this fundamental problem of legal thought’37 is his idea of legal ‘relevance’ as a legal, rather than a factual, relationship between legal orders. Again, this proves highly problematic, to the point that, contrary to Romano’s pretense, one is left having to choose his thesis of relevance as a distinctively legal, rather than factual, category of relationships between legal orders – a thesis that is workable outside legal pluralism – over his thesis of law as fact, which grounded his pluralism against Kelsen’s (normativist) monism. We will also see that this may well be symptomatic, if not of some form of duplicity, at least of some confusion between an apparent scientific discourse and a more real political agenda. III. Romano: The Tensional Revealing of Legal Pluralism as a Disguised Political Stance As Filippo Fontanelli has put it, Santi Romano’s very notion of legal order ‘may prove difficult for English minds to grasp’.38 However, whereas, for the former, ‘it [was] less important – in [his] study – to point out the potential contradictions than to describe Romano’s intuitions and their enduring validity’,39 for me, here, it is just the opposite. Still, I totally agree with Fontanelli’s warning that ‘Hauriou and Romano’s thinking is not to be confused with the objective sociology of Durkheim, Gurvitch and Ehrlich, who explored the relationship between law and society within the framework of a sociology of law, and treated law as merely one aspect of the social structure’s organisation’.40 But Hauriou was no legal pluralist; Romano was. And, if it is true that claims similar to, if not the same as, those of contemporary ‘radical’ legal pluralists had been made before them, they were made not by Ehrlich, but by Romano. The latter summarized the apparent aim of his famous 1918 book41 in the following words: ‘I have specifically sought to enter into the legal field that fact of the social order which was generally regarded as antecedent to law’.42 In L’ordinamento giuridico, this professor of public law, whom in 1928 Mussolini would appoint president of the Consiglio di Stato (the Italian high administrative court), first defends the claim that the nature of law is essentially factual rather than normative, subsequently arguing that his proposed approach is a fully juridical one, distinct from sociology.43 His reader thus expects a concept that will be exclusively factual and legal at the same time, having the former aspect at the level of epistemology and the latter on that of methodology. Formally, the book is divided into two parts, the first on law as institution, the second on the plurality of legal orders and their interplay. Regarding the deep nature of ‘law’ – a term which he ends up treating as synonymous not only with ‘legal order’, but also with ‘institution’ and ‘social being (or body)’ – Romano first gives this somewhat convoluted explanation: ‘This conscience which embodies the foundations of the coexistence of individuals and the system within which they are united, which acts as a mediator in the relationships among the subjects or between the subjects and the body which they constitute, an embodiment of the social ego, of the abstract, objective, typical socius, is in fact expressed by the law’.44 This suggests that there are three superimposed levels of reality: (1) the social ego, or the foundations of the system of coexistence of individuals; (2) the embodiment of this social ego in a ‘superior conscience’45 and (3) the ‘expression’ or ‘embodiment’ of this (1977) European Yearbook in Law and Sociology 42. 37 Belley, “Pluralisme juridique”, supra note 8. 38 Filippo Fontanelli, “Santi Romano and L’ordinamento giuridico: The Relevance of a Forgotten Masterpiece for Contemporary International, Transnational and Global Legal Relations” (2011) 2 Transnational Legal Theory 67 at 68. 39 Ibid. at 70. 40 Ibid. at 72. 41 Santi Romano, L’ordre juridique [L’ordinamento giuridico], 2d ed, translated from the Italian by Lucien François & Pierre Gothot, re-issue presented by Pierre Mayer (Paris: Dalloz, 2002) [translated from the French by Léonid Sirota] [Romano, L’ordre juridique]. As a book, this work was first published in 1918. 42 Ibid. § 13 at 30n. 43 Ibid. § 24 at 71: in the ‘Summary’ of the first of L’ordinamento giuridico’s two chapters, Romano emphasizes that he has ‘not considered’ this ‘social being’, which he refers to as ‘institution’, sociologically, but ‘in and for itself, that is to say, insofar as it is the product of a legal order, and even insofar as it is an objective system of law’. 44 Ibid. § 7 at 12. 45 Ibid.

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conscience in law. Puzzlingly, Romano adds, on the following page, that there is ‘no reason to consider this social ego as the source of law’, since it ‘is the law itself, and the norm is only its expression’.46 Thus not only does the intermediary of the ‘superior conscience’ make a quick exit, but law is also reduced to the ‘social ego’ consisting of the systemic foundations of the coexistence of individuals. The reader is forced to conclude that, on the previous page, ‘law’ meant not ‘law’, but ‘norm’. Indeed, the essence of Romano’s legal theory is as follows. Law is consubstantial with society: only ‘that which does not exceed the purely individual sphere, that which does not reach beyond the life of an individual as such is not law (ubi jus ibi societas), and, moreover, there can be no society in the true meaning of the word where the legal phenomenon does not appear (ubi societas ibi jus)’;47 ‘the antithesis or some kind of opposite of law exists only where there appears something irreducibly antisocial, meaning individual by nature’.48 Yet, for that critic of Jellinek’s ‘juristic voluntarism’,49 society is ‘not only a relationship between individuals … but an entity that is distinct from the individuals who make it up and concretely constitutes a unit’.50 Such a unit must thus be understood not as a set of relationships, but as an order, since ‘any social manifestation, by virtue of the very fact of its being social, is ordered with respect at least to the members of the society’.51 Finally, the social order ‘is not that which results from the existence of norms of all origins that regulate social relationships. It does not exclude these norms; it even makes use of them, integrating them within its sphere; but it precedes and dominates them nonetheless’.52 This social order which precedes and dominates norms is no more and no less than law itself, so that any social order is also a legal one: ‘Any force, when it is indeed social and thus organized, is ipso facto transformed into law. … Conversely, that which has no social organization, and only that, is not law’.53 Thus ‘law, before being norm, before having to do with one or many social relationships, is the organization, structure, attitude of the society in which it is in force and which, through it, grows into a unit, into a being which exists by itself’.54 Society, social order and priority over norms – the essential components of the idea of law as legal order – are also found within the notion of ‘institution’: ‘Any legal order is an institution and, conversely, any institution is a legal order: there is, between these two concepts, a necessary and absolute equivalence’.55 It is then not surprising to learn that, for Romano, the existence of persons among whom mere relationships exist is not sufficient to give rise to an institution; there must be a closer and more organic link; there must emerge a social superstructure, which not only their individual relationships but, even before that, the determination of their kind will be dependent on or dominated by.56

46 Ibid. § 7 at 13. 47 Ibid. § 10 at 17–18. 48 Ibid. § 14 at 32. 49 As with the works of Santi Romano, the current state of translation and, hence, knowledge of Georg Jellinek’s works in Anglo-American scholarship is shockingly poor. More generally, surely Leslie Green is right, in “Jurisprudence for Foxes” (2012) 3 Transnational Legal Theory 150, in pointing out that the new professionalization of jurisprudence, which carries a lot of advantages, came at a certain price, part of which is that ‘[t]here are now many writers in jurisprudence – and many more students of it – who have read nothing in the subject published before 1961. Too often they repeat mistakes made and corrected long ago’ (at 159). There exists an English translation, by Max Farrand, of Jellinek’s Die Erklärung der Menschen- und Bürgerrechte (1895): G Jellinek, The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of Citizens: A Contribution to Modern Constitutional History (New York: H Holt, 1901; reprint Westport, Conn: Hyperion Press, 1979). However, not only System der subjektiven öffentlichen Rechte (Freiburg im Breisgau: JCB Mohr, 1892), but also Jellinek’s masterpiece, Das Recht des modernen Staates (Berlin: O Häring, 1900), are still awaiting an English translator. In the meantime, see especially the excellent article by Duncan Kelly, “Revisiting the Rights of Man: Georg Jellinek on Rights and the State” (2004) 22 LHR 493. 50 Romano, L’ordre juridique, supra note 41 § 10 at 18. 51 Ibid. 52 Ibid. § 10 at 19. 53 Ibid. § 14 at 32. 54 Ibid. § 10 at 19. 55 Ibid. 56 Ibid. § 18 at 49.

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We might ask how society, now suddenly reduced to that which is ‘legal’ and freed from the ‘superior conscience’ that was supposed to ‘embody’ it and thus to explain the way in which it could connect with individuals, can thus transform itself from an abstract ‘ego’ to a concrete unit. In my view, a partial answer to this mystery is that the word ‘concrete’ here is taken to mean both ‘specific’, as opposed to ‘universal’, and ‘objective’, as opposed to ‘subjective’. In other words – except in the peculiar sense in which Hegel is opposed to Kant57 – ‘concrete’ is not really used here in opposition to ‘abstract’. It is quite the contrary, for otherwise one cannot answer the question how, in Romano’s view, the links between the pre-eminent society and the inferior reality consisting of individuals and the relationships among them, are ultimately established. While, for Romano, ‘the institution is not a requirement of reason, an abstract principle, an ideal quid, [but] to the contrary a real, effective being’,58 it must be kept in mind that this ‘reality’ or ‘effectiveness’ is understood as immaterial: ‘the objective character of the institution … does not imply that it must be considered as an object, as a res: the institution is actually an objective legal order’.59 Having defined an institution as ‘any social being or body’, Romano specifies that the ‘being of which [he] speak[s] must have an objective and concrete existence and, despite being immaterial, its individuality must nevertheless be apparent, visible: it is precisely the better to express this character that [he has] called it a social “body”’.60 Although it does not in any way explain how law as a ‘social ego’ can actually be seen, this ‘body’ metaphor allows us not to be too easily sidetracked by some of Romano’s assertions and phrases that could otherwise contradict his claim of the identity of law and institution. This is notably the case of the phrase ‘social order established by law’,61 as well as of the assertions that ‘law cannot be revealed otherwise than within an institution [that] exists as such insofar as the law creates and sustains it’,62 or that ‘law consists above all in the setting up and the organization of a social entity’.63 Now, that seems difficult to reconcile with the claim that ‘there can be no law before or outside institutions’.64 Yet, while in Romano’s view law ‘creates’ institutions, it does so from within, in the way in which we might say that life ‘creates’ and ‘sustains’ the living body, outside of which it is, at least in the biological sense, inconceivable.65 The claim that law need not always, and, above all, does not essentially, consist of a set of norms is a leitmotif of L’ordinamento giuridico. Romano relies notably on the ‘fact’ that ‘it is well known that one can find throughout history legal orders without written norms and even, strictly speaking, without unwritten norms’.66 Thus, norms ‘are or can be a part of a legal order, but it is far from being limited to them’.67 Legal norms are not the essence of law, but rather ‘are linked to or even attached on other elements to which they owe all their force’.68 While it may have been wrongly believed, continues Romano, that law was a product or an effect of institutions rather than being coterminous with them, ‘that was due to a failure to go 57 See especially GWF Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, edited by Allen W Wood, translated by HB Nisbet (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1991). 58 Romano, L’ordre juridique, supra note 41 § 24 at 71. 59 Ibid. § 11 at 24. 60 Ibid. § 12 at 25. 61 Ibid. § 10 at 19. 62 Ibid. § 13 at 31. 63 Ibid. § 16 at 38. 64 Ibid. § 16 at 37. 65 Ibid. § 15 at 34: Law is the vital principle of any institution, the soul that holds together the various elements of which it consists, and which defines and secures the structure of immaterial beings. Conversely, an institution is always a legal regime. It may be, in a sense, inexact to conceive of it as the body, the skeleton, the backbone of the law; but it remains the case that it is inextricable from it, substantively as much as conceptually, just as life is indistinguishable from the living body. These are not two related phenomena of which one follows the other; they are actually one and the same phenomenon. [In a footnote:] The assertion that the chicken is born from the egg does not contradict the assertion that the egg is born from the chicken – the issue is to what purpose and in what sense one asserts one or the other of these things, both of which are true, as is true also the assertion that the egg and the chicken are two aspects of the same phenomenon. 66 Ibid. § 7 at 14. 67 Ibid. § 7 at 15. 68 Ibid. § 8 at 16.

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past traditional doctrine which conceives of law as of a norm or a set of norms’.69 Rather, ‘what gives law its fundamental and paramount character is the institutions in which it becomes concrete, not the norms nor, more generally, the precepts through which it acts’.70 According to Romano, Hauriou – at whom he undoubtedly takes aim in asserting that he is ‘not among those who believe that institutions are sources of law and thus that law is an effect, a product of institutions, but rather that there is a perfect identity between the concept of institutions and that of legal order, regarded as a whole and as a unit’71 – also commits the same mistake regarding the essence of law and, therefore, the way in which it is related to institutions. Not to be confused with norms, law is not the product of, but the same as, institution: Romano’s criticism of Hauriou then leads him to his legal pluralism, with his claim that one cannot ‘speak of an institution so comprehensive that it would indiscriminately encompass all the others’.72 In the introduction to the 1907 edition of his Précis de droit administratif et de droit public général, Hauriou wrote that the state was ‘the institution of institutions’.73 To be sure, for Romano, the state ‘represents today the most important institution’;74 but it is no more than that. Hauriou would later make an apparently similar statement to the effect that, ‘[o]f all the institutions to which the social order gave rise, the state is the pre-eminent one’.75 Nonetheless, Romano differs from Hauriou by the degree to which he stresses that the state is not the only institution in which legal science ought to be interested. He thus undertakes to ‘refut[e] the doctrine that reduces all law to that of the state’,76 including the idea that ‘it is the state that … confers a legal character [on other orders], whether by constituting them directly or by merely acknowledging them’.77 He does so by opposing to the statist legal monism a theory of the ‘plurality of legal orders’ which, along with the theory of relationships between these orders, is the subject of the second and last chapter of his famous work. Against Kelsen, and much more ambitiously than Hart would later do, Romano claims to draw out all the consequences of international law’s largely non-state character. Moreover, not content with asserting that the laws of states and international law are distinct legal orders, he generalizes this claim and makes it the starting point of the law-defining endeavour. According to Romano, it is in error that ‘this principle which we call that of the plurality of legal order, unchallenged so long as it is applied to different states and even, at least in the most recent scholarship, to relationships between international law and that of states, is often fiercely denied with respect to other orders’.78 The Italian jurist thus believes that ‘there are as many legal orders as institutions’79 (for example, the international order or the order of the Church, of factories, businesses, professional groups, schools, gambling clubs or criminal groups – any institution is a legal order) and that to be aware of this increasing phenomenon is just to understand ‘what is called the crisis of the modern state’.80 In expounding Romano’s theory of the plurality of legal orders, the second chapter of L’ordinamento giuridico seems to me to expose some of its author’s more fundamental claims, insofar as these claims may well underlie that apparently central one according to which law is fact. Romano seems to suggest that the normative conception of law is due to its state-based understanding, with legal statism thus acting as a sort of latter-day natural law theory, a natural law ruled by a certain lack of historical perspective. Romano explains that: as the modern state asserted itself and its power and hegemony over other communities, previously independent and sometimes rival, grew, it became possible to believe that the unification of the legal order had been accomplished and thus to deploy without entering into flagrant contradiction with reality the theory of state as lord and master, not only of its own law, but of all law. 69 Ibid. § 11 at 24. 70 Ibid. § 16 at 36. 71 Ibid. § 11 at 23. 72 Ibid. § 25 at 77. 73 Maurice Hauriou, “Préface” in Précis de droit administratif et de droit public general (Paris: L Larose et L Tenin, 1907) [translated by Léonid Sirota]. 74 Romano, L’ordre juridique, supra note 41 § 13 at 31. 75 Maurice Hauriou, Précis de droit constitutionnel, 2d ed (Paris: Sirey, 1929) at 78 [translated by Léonid Sirota]. 76 Romano, L’ordre juridique, supra note 41 § 26–7. 77 Ibid. § 25 at 77–8. 78 Ibid. § 25 at 77. 79 Ibid. 80 Ibid. § 27 at 82–3.

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While this theory must historically be understood as an inexact account and as an exaggeration of an otherwise remarkable conjecture, doctrinally we must understand that it is a return to a natural law conception, of which it is at first glance an antithesis, but in reality is one of the most certain consequences.81

Despite the appearance of a fracture between (normative) positivism and natural law conceptions, there is, in Romano’s view, some (monist) continuity in the way in which the state has (in legal positivism) taken over from morality as the sole source of law.82 L’ordinamento giuridico thus implicitly, and more fundamentally, argues that legal statism amounts to natural law not only formally, but also substantively, as if the law of the state were deemed to be coextensive with just law. A denial of the legal character of orders that the state deems illicit, Romano writes, ‘can only result from an ethical judgment, because such entities are often criminal or immoral’, even though, in fact, this ‘could only be acceptable if this necessary and absolute dependence of positive law on morality had been demonstrated – yet, to the contrary, this dependence, understood in this sense that seems to us naïve, is in our view nonexistent’.83 Romano’s institutionalism was openly inspired by the works of Hauriou and Renard. As for his theory of the plurality of legal orders, he considers it to be an extension of Gierke’s, according to which any organic community can produce law,84 which he claims to have expanded and completed, respectively, by replacing the concept of community by that of institution, and by rejecting any reduction of law to normative production.85 Unlike his fellow pupils of Orlando and founding fathers of the Italian School of Public Law, and ‘even if [he] had an eminently “German education”, his main points of reference were Gierke and, most of all, Georg Jellinek, instead of Laband and Gerber’.86 His theory of law as a social force paramount over individuals also seems close to Jhering’s.87 These issues of lineage notwithstanding, however, we would do well to ask what this alleged pluralist grasp of law as fact in a legal, rather than a sociological, perspective might ultimately mean. On this point, the following explanation is commonly accepted: while for the sociologist the plurality of legal orders is a question of fact, the jurist can, for his part, approach it from the standpoint of legal relations88 – as if Romano had not first stressed the factual nature of law. My own view is rather that the analytical framework of ‘relevance’ relationships between different legal orders, which is by far Romano’s most fruitful contribution to legal science and is workable outside legal pluralism, works for all intents and purposes to refute his theory of law as fact, which, contra Kelsen’s normativist monism, grounded his theory of legal pluralism. ‘From a legal perspective’, Romano insists,

81 Ibid. § 26 at 79–80. 82 See ibid. § 26. 83 Ibid. § 30 at 90. Romano’s claim here is that there is no necessary link between positive law and morality, not that such a link, which can exist incidentally, is necessarily absent. While a legal order can have nothing to do with morality, this is not necessarily the case of all legal orders. In Romano’s view, it is: a serious mistake to say, as so many do, that in primitive societies law is merged with customs and even religion. What happens is not a merger or an absence of differentiation between elements which, by nature, ought to remain separate. Rather, in such societies, law, which should not be regarded as less pure than that of other, more advanced societies, is laced with principles drawn from customs and religious belief. To this day, English law, which no one will regard as insufficiently advanced, considers to be ‘law’ [in English in the original] not only the statutes enacted by Parliament, but also any rule, whatever its origin and contents, that the courts apply and enforce [ibid. § 14 at 33–4]. 84 Otto von Gierke, Deutsches Privatrecht (Berlin: Keip, 2001) vol 1 at 119–20 [first published 1895]. 85 Romano, L’ordre juridique, supra note 41 § 32 at 96–7. 86 Aldo Sandulli, “Santi Romano and the Perception of the Public Law Complexity” (2009) 1 Italian Journal of Public Law 1 at 7–8. 87 Rudolf von Jhering, Der Zweck im Recht (Hildesheim: Breitkopf und Härtel, 1970) [first published 1877–83]. Of the Zweck originally planned by Jhering, the two volumes that were ultimately published are not even the entirety of the first part. An English translation of the first volume of the fourth German edition was published as Law as a Means to an End, translated by Isaac Husik (Boston: Boston Books, 1913). 88 See e.g. J-G Belley, “Pluralisme juridique”, supra note 8.

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it can happen that each order is considered on its own and for its own sake; so that in the consideration of one legal order, a second is only taken into account insofar as the first one refers to it for its own purposes, and with the meaning, perhaps a very peculiar one, that the first gives to the second in referring to it.89

Romano’s notion of legal ‘relevance’90 must then be understood from this legal perspective. In order for one legal order to be ‘relevant’ to another, the existence, contents or effectiveness of the former must conform to the conditions imposed by the latter; ‘this first order is only valid for the second legal order as prescribed by the latter’.91 The relevance of an order for another is only the taking into account or, put another way, the recognition of the former – whether of its existence, its contents or its effectiveness – by the latter. And Romano’s main contribution may well be to have explained more precisely, against Kelsen and half a century before Hart, that to be valid for another order, the norm of a given order need not be received and incorporated into that other order, but be simply referred to by it.92 In short, as Romano says regarding the various possibilities that his model of relevance allows him to envision: we can observe the possibility of mutually independent institutions; of institutions wherein one asserts its independence from the other, while on the contrary the latter asserts that the former does depend on it; and of institutions which, in their mutual relationship, are, in various ways and to a variable extent, co-ordinate and equal or placed in positions respectively of supremacy or subordination.93

In other words, it is necessary to distinguish: (1) mutual irrelevance, (2) unilateral relevance and (3) mutual relevance, which establishes true relationships, whether of subordination or of coordination. Being a trait of legal relationships between legal orders, relevance must not be confused with ‘the factual importance that one order may have for another’.94 For Romano, it is even ‘clear’ that, ‘if a legal order is irrelevant according to another one, this means that there is no relationship whatever between them’.95 Indeed, the existence, contents, and effectiveness of an order are largely independent from its recognition by others, including by the state.96 Thus, for example, the effectiveness of an order which the state considers illegal will be what it will be, according to its constitution, its ends, its means, its norms, and the sanctions that it will be able to enforce. In actual fact, such an order will be weak if the state is strong, whereas sometimes it will be so strong as to undermine the state’s very existence.97

89 Romano, L’ordre juridique, supra note 41 § 29 at 88. 90 I am using this word to render the Italian ‘rilevanza’ and the French ‘relevance’, used in the translation. See ibid. at 65n. 91 Ibid. § 34 at 106. 92 Ibid. § 34 at 107n: It is indeed the case that in a given original order, the norms of another order can only be valid pursuant to its own norms. However, it seems to me inexact to say that any order only considers its own norms as legal, and regards all others as irrelevant as such: this is not only arbitrary, but also contrary to reality. The principle that any original order is always exclusive must be understood as meaning that such an order can, but not that it necessarily must, deny the legal value of any other. … In other words, an order can ignore or even deny another; it can take it into account by attributing to it a character different from that which it attributes to itself, and it is therefore free to regard it as a pure fact. But it is difficult to see why it could not recognize it as a legal order, if only to an extent, with certain effects, and with the characteristics which it deems opportune to confer on it. Indeed one must observe that to be attributed characteristics – which the order in question might not attribute to itself – it must sometimes be recognized as a legal order and not as a mere fact; it is thus, for example, when an order which considers itself original is deemed by another one to be derivative. 93 Ibid. § 33 at 106. 94 Ibid. § 34 at 106. 95 Ibid. (‘[a]n entity’s taking on or not the character of institution depends on its structure, its internal law – not the way, which is in any case variable, in which the laws of the state construe it’). 96 Ibid. § 19 at 55. The state’s failure to recognize a legal order ‘only entails the lack of such effects so far as the state is concerned, but not the absence of all effect outside the sphere of the state’ (ibid. § 29 at 86). 97 Ibid. § 30 at 90.

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As for institutions ‘accepted by the state order’, they are generally regulated ‘directly by the laws of the state or by private legal acts subject to the order of the state’, and yet ‘it often so happens that [the state] fails to grasp and fully to regulate the situation of these entities’, which then give themselves ‘their own internal legal order, different from that which the state attributes to them’.98 Besides, irrelevance, which is the absence of legal relations, does not mean the absence of factual ones. Thus, while they constitute ‘two legal worlds’ which ‘legally remain or can remain always distinct and autonomous’, the Church and the state, for example, can nonetheless ‘substantially influence’ each other.99 Convincing as Romano’s discussion of relevance in the second chapter of his 1918 book may be, a question indeed remains so long as one keeps in mind the book’s first chapter and its stated purpose.100 Relegating norms to the rank of epiphenomena of the law, Romano nevertheless claims that his approach is a legal one rather than one of law-as-fact sociology; yet immediately after making this claim, he distinguishes between legal and factual relationships between legal orders. Now, this suggests that he believes that there are two kinds of facts about legal orders: the sociologically and the legally relevant ones. The reader is then surprised to find that, in contrast with the consistently firm rejection of the ‘doctrine reducing law to a set of norms’ in the first chapter, there springs up in the second – in a footnote, no less – a dichotomy between, on the one hand, legal orders and, on the other, ‘pure’ or ‘mere’ facts!101 Without being of an essentially normative nature, the legal order is then ultimately an ‘impure’ fact. Yet what exactly can such ‘impure’ facts, which make up legal (as opposed to factual) relationships between legal orders, consist of, if not norms? Admittedly, and although it is better in my view to speak of ‘operations of recognition’ rather than ‘relevance relationships’, we ought to prefer Romano’s confident observation that the operation of recognition is not reception, that it can perfectly well be a reference, a possibility to which we might add, by way of example and metaphor, that of ‘translation’, to Hart’s hesitation on this point. Indeed, in his 1968 study on ‘Kelsen’s Doctrine of the Unity of Law’,102 Hart begins by observing that, short of stating more precisely the new notion of recognition implied by what I am describing here as ‘operations of recognition’, it will be necessary to conclude that the rules thus recognized belong in the same way to both of the legal systems concerned – that which recognizes them as well as that by which the rules are recognized. He then anticipates the objection that the rules thus recognized are not applied directly as rules of foreign law, but rather indirectly via the rules of domestic law to which the operation of recognition merely gives substantive content. But that is only to concede that this solution provides no satisfactory criteria for distinguishing the recognition of foreign law and the recognition of belonging to the system – in other words, between the operations of recognition and the rule of recognition – and thus to conclude: Perhaps this difficulty may be met by distinguishing two different sorts of recognition that might be called ‘original’ and ‘derivative’ recognition. In an ordinary case where there is no foreign element, for example, where an English court simply applies an English statute, the court does not base its recognition and application of the statute on the fact that courts of some other country have recognized or would recognize it; this is original recognition. But whereas in cases raising questions of private international law, part of the court’s reasons for recognizing a law is that it has been or would be originally recognized by the courts of another country this is derivative recognition of a foreign law. Whether in such cases we should say the court applies the law that is thus derivatively recognized or only that it applies a law with similar content does not, I think, affect this distinction, though I have no doubt it needs further elaboration.103

 98 Ibid. § 31 at 91–2. This means that ‘there are entities which for the state’s law are partly factual entities, whereas, considered in themselves, they have the institutional character which makes them legal organizations’ (ibid. § 31 at 94).  99 Ibid. § 29 at 88. 100 See supra note 41 and accompanying text. 101 Romano, L’ordre juridique, supra note 41 § 34 at 107n. 102 HLA Hart, “Kelsen’s Doctrine of the Unity of Law” in Howard E Kiefer & Milton K Munitz, eds, Ethics and Social Justice (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1968). 103 Ibid. at 193.

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Much better than Hart, then, who arguably deserves some criticism for having ignored his work, the Italian jurist has succeeded in resolving the mystery of the operation of recognition of one legal order by another, notably by distinguishing ‘reference’ and ‘reception’. However, not only is this particular contribution independent from legal pluralism – outside of which it is workable (unless everything other than Kelsen’s radical monism104 is to be called pluralism) in order to account for legal relationships between two different states’ legal systems for instance – but the problem remains that Romano’s proposed distinction between the recognition of one legal order by another and the factual importance of one order for another can only operate at the cost of renouncing his anti-normativist theory of law as fact, which aimed at grounding his legal pluralism. Here one has to favour the Hartian distinction between the factual question of the existence of, and belonging to, a legal order, and the legal question of what I prefer to call a legal order’s ‘operations of recognition’, which is meant to be based on the difference between the norm that exists as a matter of fact and the acceptance/use of a norm that exists in the more strictly legal, that is, normativist, sense of being valid.105 In other words, one has to conclude that even Romano cannot actually help but conceive of law as a matter of norms. But if Romano did not really believe that law is essentially made of facts – in which case norms would be a merely contingent legal phenomenon – then L’ordinamento giuridico’s central thread appears to be some form of pluralist anti-statism indeed. My thesis, however, is that the 1918 book’s relativization is a front, and that Romano’s constant target was never the state, but rather the liberal Rule of Law state. So, yes, he had a problem with legal norms, but not with the state, so that his project was to permit to be called ‘law’ that which was not considered as such. A formal member of the Fascist Party from 1928, Romano was a strong advocate of the unified Italian state before and after L’ordinamento giuridico, which can be regarded as an interlude once situated within the context of its author’s intellectual itinerary. In his 1909 essay on the ‘Crisis of the Modern State’ (Lo Stato moderno e la sua crisi), Romano wrote that such a crisis: can be considered as the result of the convergence of these two trends, which reciprocally worsen each other: the gradual build-up of society based on specific social interests is ever more in the process of losing its atomistic character, and the lack of legal or institutional tools, which can be found in society itself, as a means of manifesting and imposing its organization within the State’s one.106

His proposed solution was ‘to establish an upper organization which can comprise, reconcile and harmonize minor organizations into which the first organization is subdivided. This upper organization can and will be the modern State’.107 The liberal state was considered unfit to face this crisis of the modern state, hence the need for new ‘legal’ corporatist-statist (that is, fascist) conceptual tools. More precisely, at this point Romano already ‘completely understands that the political sphere is going to prevail over the legal one’.108 Aldo Sandulli reports that, in a 1928 book review for instance, some ten years after L’ordinamento giuridico, Romano explains that ‘there is a profound antithesis between the Liberal State and the Fascist one’, since the first ‘is opened to all kinds of ideals and plans; this is the reason why it is incapable of controlling the existing forces in the Country, but is controlled by them’. Romano agrees with Rocco that the Fascist State, in contrast, accepted and implemented ‘until the extreme consequences’ the teaching of the modern school of Public Law, according to which ‘sovereignty does not lie in the people, but in the State, … provided with its own legal status, which is different from that of individuals and asserted its authority over them as a superior entity’.109 According to Nicola Matteuci, Italian legal institutionalism and the pluralism it claimed to entail was ‘more apparent than real, insofar as from the asserted plurality of legal orders often drifts onto the more 104 See Hans Kelsen, Pure Theory of Law, 2d ed, translated by Max Knight (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967). 105 See especially Frederick Schauer, “Is the Rule of Recognition a Rule?” (2012) 3 Transnational Legal Theory 173. 106 Sandulli, supra note 86 at 18–19, translating and quoting Santi Romano, “Lo Stato moderno e la sua crisi” in Scritti minori (Milan: Giuffrè, 1950). 107 Sandulli, supra note 86 at 19. 108 Ibid. 109 Ibid. at 30, translating and quoting Santi Romano, “Recensione ad Alfredo Rocco: Le trasformazioni dello Stato. Dallo Stato liberale allo Stato fascista” [1928] Archivio giuridico.

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or less explicit argument that there is an order which is more “legal” (and organized) than others, which is precisely the State’.110 I personally cannot see any other way of making sense of L’ordinamento giuridico. Arguably more cautiously, Aldo Sandulli concludes that it can be argued that ‘there are two possible readings of L’ordinamento giuridico: the first, out of the context of (the rest of) Romano’s scientific production, the second in connection with it’.111 Before he became an unrepentant fascist, Romano – whose case for legal pluralism remains, as weak as it is, the strongest – was a renowned anti-individualist and anti-Enlightenment thinker.112 As a legal theorist, he was of much (and acknowledged) use to Carl Schmitt in his attack on the Rule of Law.113 Of course, one can make use of original fascist ideas or materials without being a fascist oneself. Perhaps that person would be better off knowing about it though, the way Antonio Negri has contributed to Schmitt’s revival, for instance.114 But my point here is more precisely that, beyond the fact that theories of legal pluralism contribute very little theoretical clarity – which can, besides, be easily found outside this alleged ‘paradigm’ – the stakes of the cardinal issue they raise are principally normative, whether their authors or proponents are aware of it or not. These stakes are the Rule of Law. IV. Waldron: The Timid Intuition of Legal Pluralism as an Essentially Normative Issue What if, as an academic phenomenon, legal pluralism had indeed a different explanation than being a scientific project? To be sure, it is still possible to say, as Joël Moret-Bailly already did 10 years ago, that legal pluralism is now in fashion.115 Truth be told, ‘legal pluralism’ was inherently and characteristically ambiguous as soon as it was so named in reference to its object. As a family of theories of law, the approach was meant to be descriptive of the phenomenon of a plurality of legal orders. Yet the word ‘pluralism’, which in any case belongs more properly to the realm of political and moral philosophy, suggests attaching value to some form of plurality. Despite its scientific aspirations, legal pluralism is often quick to take on a militant tone. In his preface to a new edition of the French translation of L’ordinamento giuridico, Pierre Mayer worries that pluralist theories risk deviating from ‘the mere observation of the plurality of legal orders, based on a confrontation of the observed reality with a freely chosen definition, towards a political attitude of assertion of autonomy and suspicion of the state’.116 Similarly, Tamanaha stresses the extent to which ‘[m]any legal pluralists are anti-state law by inclination – as reflected in their attack on legal centralism – and consequently have a tendency to romanticize non-state normative systems’.117 We can see this tendency in Belley’s work. For him, the pluralist perspective ‘is an incentive to make visible and audible the decentralized social representations which the elites of the state, public education, and language consider inexistent, retrograde, repugnant, or dangerous – in short, belonging to a level of reality, dignity, or legality below that of the official culture’.118 Such confusion of levels can result in a degree of projection of the political ideal on the allegedly 110 Nicola Matteucci, “Positivismo giuridico e costituzionalismo” [1963] Rivista trimestrale di diritto e procedura civile 1030, translated and quoted in Sandulli, supra note 86 at 37. 111 Sandulli, supra note 86 at 37. 112 Ibid. at 24. 113 See especially Carl Schmitt, On the Three Types of Juristic Thought, translated by Joseph W Bendersky (Westport, Conn: Praeger, 2004). 114 See Michael Hardt & Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2000). 115 Joël Moret-Bailly, “Ambitions et ambiguïtés des pluralismes juridiques” (2002) 35 Droits 195 at 195. 116 Pierre Mayer, “Préface” in Romano, L’ordre juridique, supra note 41 [no pagination]. 117 Tamanaha, General Jurisprudence, supra note 21 at 184. 118 Belley, Terra incognita, supra note 25 at 10. In his more recent work on the topic (J-G Belley, “Le pluralisme juridique comme orthodoxie de la science du droit” (2011) 26 CJLS 257), Belley expresses concern about some of the effects that pluralism, as a new ‘orthodoxy of legal science’, might have. He takes the position that pluralism can be either ‘good’ or ‘bad’ depending on whether it serves to ‘make visible’ and thus to ‘legitimize’ ‘good’ or ‘bad’ law. He regrets the fact that the ‘dominant trend of the new legal pluralism is that of organized rather than spontaneous law’ (at 274 [translated by Léonid Sirota]). Belley specifies that this ‘dichotomy does not have here the same meaning as in Georges Gurvitch’s work’ (ibid.). His idea of spontaneous law refers rather to ‘truly personal actions and … representations of individuals’ (ibid.). It seems that what worries Belley is mostly the use of legal pluralism by large transnational corporations and by

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observed reality.119 For the pluralists’ anti-statism surely can be as blinding as the alleged statism of those they call ‘monists’, even more so if combined with (perhaps self-deceptive) confusion between the scientific and political postures. In its weaker versions, pluralism holds that the legal differentiation of societies is a function not so much of their having or lacking law as of law’s importance in these societies: a contempt for law in ancient China; an articulation of law along with other normative orders in ancient Egypt and animist Africa; a great value being put on law in the societies belonging to the monotheist tradition, including the largely secularized modern Western societies.120 While for this ethnologically inspired pluralism ‘it seems hardly conceivable that one could deny the existence of law in stateless societies, it is equally inconceivable that one could deny the pre-eminence of state law in Western societies’.121 Yet the anti-statist ideological posture of strong sociological pluralism undoubtedly originates in this weak ethnological pluralism. As Tamanaha points out, ‘[t]here was a time not long ago, especially during the early development of anthropology, when it was important politically to assert that all societies have law’.122 He thus suggests that the legal label is no longer a political or otherwise normative issue. Nothing is less certain. In his study of Hart’s and Fuller’s relationships with legal pluralism, Waldron specifies at the outset that ‘even if we grant that legal plurali[ty] exists and that we need to be able to accommodate it in our categorical scheme, indeed even if we grant that it is pervasive, there may be interesting normative and/or evaluative questions to raise’.123 In that study, Waldron argues that, contrary to the generally held opinion, Hart’s model is ‘compatible’ with legal pluralism, and Fuller’s is much less so than is usually believed. Hart’s legal evolutionism does not yet mean that he valued the legal form of society’s normative structuring for its own sake.124 If Hart did not further develop his model towards pluralism, that is simply because this issue of non-state manifestations of the legal phenomenon was of little interest to him.125 I find that argument, which is also made by Leslie Green,126 unpersuasive. I have never read Hart as insisting on the advantages of the pre-legal form of the normative structuring of society,127 except perhaps for the following excerpts, which reveal ‘sobering truths’: [T]he step from the simple form of society, where primary rules of obligation are the only means of social control, into the legal world with its centrally organized legislature, courts, officials, and sanctions brings its solid gains at a certain cost. The gains are those of adaptability to change, certainty, and efficiency, and these are immense; the cost is the risk that the centrally organized power may well be used for the oppression of numbers with whose support it can dispense, in a way that the simpler regime of primary rules could not.128 international economic law; his response is to call for a ‘critical legal pluralism’ (ibid. at 275). He neither calls into question the original anti-statism of legal pluralism nor suggests any real line of (normative) inquiry for the development of such a ‘critical’ project. 119 See e.g. ibid at 259: ‘If the practice of legal pluralism is now gaining in legitimacy and visibility in the legal sphere, it is in other words because these practices have been significantly theorized and taken on by jurists themselves’. Of course, no discourse, no matter how scientific, can be entirely objective. Yet there is quite a gap between acknowledging this and joining the ‘postmodern’ celebration of the fusion of the scientific and the political – namely, reasonableness itself. 120 Alliot, supra note 4. 121 Hugues Moutouh, “Pluralisme juridique” in Denis Alland & Stéphane Rials, eds, Dictionnaire de la culture juridique (Paris: Lamy/Presses Universitaires de France, 2003) 1158 at 1161 [translated by Léonid Sirota]. 122 Tamanaha, General Jurisprudence, supra note 21 at 202. 123 Waldron, “Legal Pluralism”, supra note 3 at 137. 124 Ibid. at 145: I mention all this to drive home the point that Hart’s attempt to draw some distinction, even a blurred and hesitant distinction, between the sort of legal system that positivists are supposed to privilege and the sort of normative order that pluralists are interested in is not associated with the denigration of the latter as problematic. He, as much as the pluralists, sees customary law as just a different kind of normative order from the formal official law of a ‘developed’ legal system. Both kinds of normative order have their advantages; both have their dangers. 125 Ibid. at 140–1: ‘[O]ne has to say that Hart did not seem particularly interested in the fact that, with a bit of pushing and shoving, his jurisprudential framework could accommodate pluralist possibilities’. 126 Green, supra note 49 at 156–7. 127 Waldron, “Legal Pluralism”, supra note 3. 128 Hart, Concept of Law, supra note 19 at 202.

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In this more complex system, only officials might accept and use the system’s criteria of legal validity. The society in which this was so might be deplorably sheeplike; the sheep might end in the slaughter-house. But there is little reason for thinking that it could not exist or for denying it the title of a legal system.129

Waldron had already noted these excerpts in papers pre-dating his 2010 study.130 Yet he had then concluded that such reservations or warnings were not enough to question the fact that Hart generally valued the legal form.131 Besides, Waldron here is missing the essential question in the debate between legal monists and pluralists, which is whether a plurality of legal orders can exist within the territory of a state. However, my purpose now is not to take Hart hostage in order to defend the legal monism which I impute to him. It is rather to show how what seems to me to be the lodestar, the most important and fruitful idea of Waldron’s study, is unfortunately not made explicit and, in my view, is poorly developed. The idea in question is that the spirit which permeates the works of both great thinkers that are Hart and Fuller, the spirit of the Anglo-American Rule of Law itself, favours a monist rather than a pluralist conception of law, which explains why Fuller’s more ideal theory of a morality intrinsic to law ultimately turns out to be substantially more monist than the Hartian sociological normativism.132 Let us think back to the first real theory of the Rule of Law. Dicey argued that the Rule of Law – which, along with parliamentary sovereignty, undergirds the legal (and unwritten) constitution of the United Kingdom – consists of three major sub-principles: (1) the principle that all, from the humblest citizen to the sovereign, are subject to law and not to arbitrary will: ‘Englishmen are ruled by the law, and by the law alone’; (2) the principle of equality before the law, ‘or the equal subjection of all classes to the ordinary law of the land administered by the ordinary Law Courts’; the ‘rule of law in this sense excludes the idea of any exemption of officials or others from … the jurisdiction of the ordinary tribunals’ and (3) the principle that constitutional law, the rules of which in foreign countries naturally form part of a constitutional code, are not the source but the consequence of the rights of individuals, as defined and enforced by the Courts; that, in short, the principles of private law have with us been by the action of the Courts and Parliament so extended as to determine the position of the Crown and of its servants; thus the constitution is the result of the ordinary law of the land.133

These three constitutive principles of the Rule of Law in the sense that is, if not canonical, then at least chronologically first, can be reduced to two fundamental dimensions. One is formal – the subjection of all to the law applied by ordinary courts – and the other substantive – the set of rights recognized for all under the common law. Already in its formal dimension, can the Rule of Law so understood not be taken to involve an irreducible element of judicial monism? And, even in its substantive dimension, can the Diceyan Rule of Law be meaningful outside a monism of fundamental rights and liberties? As problematic as the pluralist paradigm can be in legal theory, it still remains the case that, with respect for example to Aboriginal legal orders, Canadian domestic law as well as international law evidence the existence of a pluralist current which, in the long run, tends to present itself as dominant.134 Similarly to what

129 Ibid. at 117. 130 Jeremy Waldron, “All We Like Sheep” (1999) 12 Can JL & Jur 169; Jeremy Waldron, “Normative (or Ethical) Positivism” in Jules Coleman, ed, Hart’s Postscript: Essays on the Postscript to the Concept of Law (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001) 411 [Waldron, “Normative (or Ethical) Positivism”]. 131 Waldron, “Normative (or Ethical) Positivism”, ibid at 430. 132 For an example of a pluralist mobilization of Fuller in the area of Canadian aboriginal law, see Mark D Walters, “The Morality of Aboriginal Law” (2006) 31 Queen’s LJ 470. 133 AV Dicey, Introduction to the Study of the Law of the Constitution, 10th ed (London: Macmillan, 1959) at 202–3 [first published 1885]. 134 See especially Michel Morin, L’usurpation de la souveraineté autochtone : le cas des peuples de la NouvelleFrance et des colonies anglaises de l’Amérique du Nord (Montréal: Boréal, 1997); Lauren Benton, Law and Colonial Cultures: Legal Regimes in World History, 1400–1900 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002).

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Kymlicka said of the liberal tradition,135 I think that we would do well to recall that the Anglo-American Rule of Law tradition has long shown its ability to accommodate diversity. It did not wait for legal pluralist theories to do so. It is not to sing a paean to the history of colonial law to point out the conceptual capabilities demonstrated by the common law and the written law of the British tradition. Does this pluralist current run counter to the Rule of Law?136 Not as long as certain limits are respected. The recognition operations of a legal order are limited by its structural principles. In international law, the rights of indigenous peoples are generally understood as so many guarantees of a better realization of human rights.137 And indeed the modern conception of the Rule of Law includes two dimensions, one more formal, the other more substantive. In its formal dimension, the modern Rule of Law is the rule of norms rather than the pure will of the rulers. This includes an ideal of clarity, publicity, stability and enforcement of the law, but also procedural fairness. Already in this merely formal aspect, the Rule of Law’s normative value should not be overlooked, for, as E.P. Thompson has expressed, [i]f the law is evidently partial and unjust, then it will mask nothing, legitimize nothing, contribute nothing to any class’s hegemony. The essential precondition for the effectiveness of law, in its function as ideology, is that it shall display an independence from gross manipulation and shall seem to be just. It cannot seem to be so without upholding its own logic and criteria of equity; indeed, on occasion, by actually being just … the rule of law itself, the imposing of effective inhibitions upon power and the defence of the citizen from power’s all-intrusive claims, seems to me to be an unqualified human good.138

In its more substantive dimension, the Rule of Law is understood to mean the protection of a number of fundamental rights, for which the Universal Declaration of 1948 remains the least controversial reference.139 Pursuant to the modern ideal of the Rule of Law, the recognition of Aboriginal legal orders need not result in a radical judicial pluralism that would allow them fully to escape the state’s jurisdiction. It must also be subject to fundamental human rights. In this way, the Rule of Law, with its principle of equal dignity of all persons,140 not only is unopposed to such recognition, but requires it. ***

135 See especially Will Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship: A Liberal Theory of Minority Rights (Oxford: Clarendon, 1995). 136 For an example of addressing this issue in the Australian context, see Desmond Manderson, “Not Yet: Aboriginal People and the Deferral of the Rule of Law” (2008) 29 Arena 219. 137 United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, GA Res 61/295, UNGAOR, 61st Sess, UN Doc A/RES/61/295 (2007) at art 1: ‘Indigenous peoples have the right to the full enjoyment, as a collective or as individuals, of all human rights and fundamental freedoms as recognized in the Charter of the United Nations, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and international human rights law’ [footnote omitted]; art 44: ‘All the rights and freedoms recognized herein are equally guaranteed to male and female indigenous individuals’; art 46.2: ‘In the exercise of the rights enunciated in the present Declaration, human rights and fundamental freedoms of all shall be respected’; art 46.3: ‘The provisions set forth in this Declaration shall be interpreted in accordance with the principles of justice, democracy, respect for human rights, equality, non-discrimination, good governance and good faith’. 138 EP Thompson, Whigs and Hunters: The Origins of the Black Act (London: Allen Lane, 1975) at 263, 266. See also Daniel Cole, “‘An Unqualified Human Good’: E.P. Thompson and the Rule of Law” (2001) 28 JL & Soc’y 177. 139 Council of Europe, European Commission for Democracy through Law (Venice Commission), “Report on the Rule of Law” (2011) at para 41, online: Council of Europe . 140 I share the view that this principle is usefully understood as universalizing what before legal modernity was the highest rank within Western societies; see Jeremy Waldron, “Dignity and Rank” (2007) 48 Archives européennes de sociologie / European Journal of Sociology 201. On the relationship between the modern state and the principle of equal human dignity, see especially Ronald Dworkin, “The Rule of Law” (Keynote Speech, delivered at the Conference on “The Rule of Law as Practical Concept”, Lancaster House, London, UK, 2 March 2012), online: Council of Europe .

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V. Conclusion Considering the issue to be a fundamentally normative one, my critique of legal pluralism is obviously not directed at the necessarily constructed ‘fact’ of the plurality of legal orders within a single territory, nor at its study, nor at any form of recognition of non-state legal orders by that of the state. It is directed at legal pluralism as the alleged current ‘paradigm’ of legal research. I am defending a pluralism anchored in the underlying principles of the modern Rule of Law, which entail a minimum of substantive monism in the realm of human rights and of formal monism in the realm of judicial, or at least some other form of jurisdictional, review. So, pluralism through the Rule of Law: yes; legal pluralism against it: no. My claim rests not on philosophical writings, but on a second-order normative positivity consisting of what I call the ‘international standards of constitutional law’, or what others have called ‘global constitutionalism’, which feeds on international law, comparative law, and ‘crosspollination’ of constitutional, regional, and international judicial decisions. Why? To a large extent because, as Martha Nussbaum explains, even though ‘[m]any critics of universalism in ethics are really critics of metaphysical realism who assume that realism is a necessary basis for universalism … [,] this assumption is false’.141 Why? Because ‘universal ideas of the human do arise within history and from human experience, and can ground themselves in experience’,142 notably including, I should add, the idea of the Rule of Law.

141 Martha Nussbaum, “Human Capabilities, Female Human Beings” in Martha Nussbaum & Jonathan Glover, eds, Women, Culture and Development: A Study of Human Capabilities (Oxford: Clarendon, 1995) 61 at 67–8. 142 Ibid. at 69. See also Maxime St-Hilaire, La lutte pour la pleine reconnaissance des droits ancestraux : Problématique juridique et enquête philosophique (LL.D. thesis, Université Laval, 2013), online: Université Laval .

Chapter 11

Stateless Law: From Legitimacy to Validity

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Jaye Ellis

I. Introduction The phenomenon of transnational law has attracted great interest, and provoked a good deal of concern, in recent years. One of the key features of transnational law is its ambiguous relationship to the state: even when elements of transnational law are state-based, they do not draw on the authority of the state in the same way as either domestic or international law. This is due, in large measure, to the altered relationship among society, constitution and law that can be observed in transnational space. Law and law-making have less to do with a particular society on whose behalf legal and political authorities are understood to have the right and the duty to speak, and much more to do with particular problems or issue-areas around which shifting constellations of stakeholders gather. This lack of congruence among society, constitution and law becomes even more acute (or perhaps simply more obvious) when the authority to promulgate law is not anchored in a state at all, but in a civil society organization or an amorphous category of actors such as multinational firms. In cases where rules are promulgated by entities other than states, it is possible to deny that they are, or could be, legal rules, as they may be seen not to possess the necessary pedigree. However, it is also possible to define law, identify legal rules and describe the nature of the boundary between law and not-law without reference to the state: in other words, to recognize the possibility of stateless law. Arguably, a great deal of transnational law is stateless: when non-state actors invoke and apply state-based legal rules, or when a court applies legal rules beyond the jurisdiction of the state, we witness a departure from the assumption that political authorities are entitled by virtue of a constitution to speak and act in the name of a given polity. This chapter contemplates recent literature on the underlying causes of the growing importance of transnational law, and takes up a series of concerns about the impacts of this form of law, notably for democracy. The chapter concludes that the reassertion of state authority and the reaffirmation of the statebased constitution are no longer feasible, given the growing complexity of society: law must be capable of being conceived of without reference to the state. Means of addressing the clearest dangers of transnational law must be found in transnational, not national, space. One such means is the societal constitution: that is, a constitution that gives rise to political authority, including the authority to enact valid law, but that is not grounded in the state. II. The Limits of International Law The democratic deficit in international law has been discussed extensively and from a wide range of angles; the seriousness of the problem and the urgent nature of a need for a solution have become particularly evident in the post-war era as international law’s agenda grows increasingly ambitious. International law is described in this era as having undergone a transition from a law of coordination to a law of cooperation and solidarity,1 with the rise of issues such as human rights, environment, economic development and control of transnational economic activity. Important elements of the welfare state are being replicated at the international level, with much of the effort being devoted to the development of substantive norms. With the growing ambition of international law comes a higher degree of intrusion into the domestic sphere. International law is of greater relevance to individuals and communities than ever. However, access by civil society to the structures and

1 Wolfgang Friedmann, The Changing Structure of International Law (New York: Columbia University Press, 1974).

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processes of international law remains limited, and tends to concentrate almost exclusively on organizations rather than individuals, informal groups or communities. Another reason why the democratic deficit in international law is particularly problematic is because of the lack of distance between author and subject of international law. States do face pressures of various kinds to bind themselves to norms, and to respect those norms, even when they find it highly inconvenient to do so. However, far too often, states proceed in a highly self-interested manner in crafting legal obligations for themselves. In other cases, their hands seem to be tied by deference to sovereignty: for example, extraterritorial exercise of jurisdiction is carefully circumscribed, and enforcement action in global commons areas is subject to extremely narrow limits. In many areas, states seem unable to engage in the kind of deep cooperation necessary to address common problems such as environmental degradation or transnational economic activity. In the meantime, transnational space is bustling with activity. This space is often understood to be a place of refuge for actors that wish to avoid legal limitations and obligations, and certainly it can be used in this way. However, much of the activity in transnational space is normative: governance structures, decision-making processes and myriad rules operate there.2 In many instances the law and politics that are taking place in transnational space are anchored in the state. This is true, for example, of the application of rules of private international law, of extraterritorial exercises of jurisdiction and of the operation of bureaucracies and agencies within intergovernmental organizations. In many other cases, however, governance is not state-based at all, though it interacts with state-based legal and political structures. Examples of this phenomenon include lex mercatoria, the regulation of domain names on the internet and standardization and certification procedures. It seems to matter little whether transnational governance is anchored in the state or not. The impact that it has on the operations of state law, constitutions and national societies results from the disaggregation of these three categories and not from the presence or absence of a certain pedigree. We had grown accustomed to democratic governance as society giving itself law: this was understood to be one of the most important accomplishments of a constitution. When it comes to international law, it is widely acknowledged that the link is much more tenuous: the state is understood to speak on behalf of its population at the international level, and it is assumed rather than demonstrated that the state has received its instructions through democratic processes before engaging in international negotiations. Transnational law cannot be understood on these terms. If it is to be justified on democratic principles, the nature of those principles or at least the manner in which they are interpreted and applied, must be re-examined. Before turning to a closer examination of the impact of transnational law on government and governance, we will consider an approach to defining or describing law that does not depend on state consent. Particular attention will be paid to three key terms – validity, legitimacy and authority – and the relationships among them. III. Law and Politics as Autopoietic Systems The conception of law which I take as my starting point is stateless law in that it does not depend on state consent for its validity. Nevertheless, law is defined in a formal way: though the existence of law does not depend on state promulgation, there remains a boundary between law and not-law. Those rules which fall in the formal category have fulfilled certain criteria set out in a rule of recognition, though in the heterogeneous environment of transnational law there are likely to be a number of rules of recognition. These rules do not come from outside the legal system; they are put in place by the same actors that constitute a regime, organization or other legally constituted space.3 It is useful to make distinctions between the formal elements of a rule of recognition and the justifications that are provided for it. In public international law, these tend not to be distinguished, largely because they

2 Gunther Teubner, “‘Global Bukowina:’Legal Pluralism in the World Society” in Global Law without a State (Brookfield, Vt: Dartmouth, 1997) 3 at 26 [Teubner, “‘Global Bukowina’”]; Gunther Teubner, Verfassungsfragmente: Gesellschaftlicher Konstitutionalismus in der Globalisierung (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2012) at 21 [Teubner, Verfassungsfragmente]. 3 Teubner, Verfassungsfragmente, supra note 2 at 15; Gunther Teubner, Law as an Autopoietic System, translated by Anna Bankowska & Ruth Adler (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993) at 1–2 [Teubner, Law as an Autopoietic System].

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overlap to a great extent. One variant of positivism in international law holds that legal rules gain this status through state consent. Another variant – formalism – holds that state consent may be the underlying political justification for the rules of recognition, but that the important thing is the formal rules about rule-making not their link back to state consent. This makes it possible, for example, to argue that newly independent states are bound under many circumstances by conventions entered into and customary law acquiesced to on their behalf by their colonial masters. To legitimate this rule, authors often rely on legal fictions such as implied consent. However, the fact that newly independent states are subject to international law in these circumstances is brought about through the operation of a series of rules regarding the imposition of international rules on entities that come to be recognized as states. In political discourses, reference to fictions such as implied consent serves the purpose of legitimating a legal conclusion that a state is bound by a rule despite its not having in fact assented to it, thus reasserting the grounding of international law on democratic principles. Autopoietic theory helps us to discern this distinction between the validity of the rule on the legal system’s terms and its legitimacy on the political system’s terms. Crucially, it also makes clear the interdependence of law and politics. When legal rules are being interpreted and applied, reference is made to political considerations. To apply the rules that govern the transmission of legal obligations from colonial to newly independent states, for example, the legal system must make reference to the political purposes that these rules are meant to serve: order, certainty and stability, but also respect for democratic principles and self-determination. But decisions about the pieces of information to be taken from the political environment, along with the manner in which they are used in processes of reasoning, are made within the legal system, and on its own terms. The rule of recognition, as stated above, is also a product of the legal system. In other words, the legal system brings itself into existence, and creates and maintains the boundaries between itself and its environment, including other systems such as politics and ethics.4 However, the legal system also interacts with and influences its environment, as long as it is discernible as a legal system from the point of view of other systems such as politics or economics. The validity of a legal rule is important but insufficient when the legal system interacts with other systems. It is not enough for the legal system to assert that, according to its own logic, a given rule, or the manner of its application, is valid. Legal rules must also be seen to have been created by actors with the necessary authority to bring law into existence. The primary and secondary rules and the processes through which they were brought into being must be recognized as legitimate. The interrelation between these three concepts – validity, authority and legitimacy – is illuminated by Luhmann’s concept of the constitution, namely the structural coupling of law and politics. Law without constitutions might be valid on its own terms, but the production of law in the absence of the authority that a constitution bestows can be recognized as legitimate only on a case-by-case basis, depending on an analysis of a range of factors such as the manner in which the particular rule was produced and the likely consequences of its application. The agent that constitutes the regime, articulates a rule of recognition and purports to promulgate legal rules must possess political authority. This authority is bestowed upon it by the legal system. In other words, the political and legal systems are mutually dependent; each requires the other in order to function. Political authority, in order to possess legitimacy, must be both constituted and constrained by law; law requires political authority for its validity. Each is available to the other; at the same time, their distinctiveness and autonomy are maintained.5 IV. The Necessity of Transnational Law The significance of the autonomy of law and politics begs the question why they should be autonomous at all, if they are so heavily dependent on one another. Would it not be possible for the authority of legal rules to be established directly, for example through plebiscites or other vehicles for mass participation, rather than indirectly, through a constitution? And if a constitution is necessary, why not continue to rely on state constitutions? This is the assumption that appears to be operating within theories of the validity of international law that rest heavily on state consent: domestic political and legal processes, organized through constitutions, 4 Teubner, Law as an Autopoeitic System, ibid. at 19–20, 24, 41. 5 Niklas Luhmann, Die Politik der Gesellschaft (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2000) at 352.

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bestow upon heads of state the authority to speak on behalf of their populations at the international level. Of course, this argument is a placeholder rather than a rigorous demonstration of the authority of states to enact international law or the legitimacy of the rules and conclusions that issue from international legal processes. We know that some constitutions are shams; that some heads of state usurp rather than merit the capacity to speak on behalf of their populations at the international level; that the state interest is too often an empty vessel filled with the short-term, short-sighted ambitions and desires of politicians. But there is another, more far-reaching issue, namely that the fragmentation of society makes it impossible to speak of societies ordered and organized through state constitutions6 and contained by national boundaries. The speed, density and consequences of transactions and interactions across borders call for institutions and structures, including legal ones, to support them. The transnational order which emerges around stateless law conceived of in this manner is, in fact, rather disorderly: it is highly fragmented and horizontally structured. Legal spaces such as regimes and organizations are constituted in an ad hoc and opportunistic manner, depending on the perceived need for law and on the presence of actors who are capable of creating regimes. These fragmented regimes, through processes of ongoing interaction, coexistence and conflict, make adaptations to one another’s presence, and may form relatively stable interrelationships if their interactions are frequent. This environment may seem needlessly chaotic, but it may also represent a reasonably well-adapted response to the complexity and uncertainty that characterize transnational governance. The ability of states to control activities on their territories has been significantly reduced. While blame is generally placed at the door of economic globalization, other forces appear to be at work: Teubner argues that the problem is not caused by globalization but by ‘a basic deficiency of modern constitutionalism’, arising out of uncertainty about the extent to which, and how, states should govern the broader society: science, education, provision of medical care, etc.7 The problems that states face are due not to globalization, though globalization has exacerbated them; they are due to the fragmentation of society into multiple systems, each possessing its own objectives and operating according to its own logic.8 We have already noted that transnational law is not always stateless law. However, distance begins to emerge between the producer of the norms and the places where they are doing their work. The state becomes less involved in these processes, or may be involved not as simply a sovereign authority but as a party to a dispute – or merely as a stakeholder. This and related phenomena, all of which result from the fragmentation of society and the emergence first of non-state rules and then of non-state, or societal, constitutions, can be seen as the collapse of a series of distinctions, as described by Viellechner: a breakdown between domestic and international; between public and private; and between statute and contract.9 A fourth distinction, between state and non-state, is also being challenged. The breakdown of the distinction between public and private has the most obvious ramifications for democratic principles. Benedict Kingsbury captures nicely the importance of publicness for law, arguing that the rule of recognition in international law could be restructured around the notion of publicness,10 which he sees as ‘a way of describing that quality of law which entails law claiming both to stand in the name of the  6 Moritz Renner, “The Dialectics of Transnational Economic Constitutionalism” in Christian Joerges & Josef Falke, eds, Karl Polanyi, Globalisation and the Potential of Law in Transnational Markets (Oxford: Hart, 2011) 419 at 422. See also Poul Kjaer’s discussion of the differentiation of national culture into a series of cultures – legal, scientific, artistic, etc. – drastically decreasing the utility of the concept of the nation-state: Poul F Kjaer, “The Structural Transformation of Embeddedness” in Christian Joerges & Josef Falke, eds, Karl Polanyi, Globalisation and the Potential of Law in Transnational Markets (Oxford: Hart, 2011) 85 at 94 [Kjaer, “Structural Transformation”].  7 Gunther Teubner, “Societal Constitutionalism: Alternatives to State-Centred Constitutional Theory?” in Christian Joerges, Inger-Johanne Sand & Gunther Teubner, eds, Transnational Governance and Constitutionalism (Oxford: Hart, 2004) 3 at 5.  8 Andreas Fischer-Lescano & Gunther Teubner, Regime-Kollisionen: Zur Fragmentierung des globalen Rechts (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2006) at 24; Teubner, Verfassungsfragmente, supra note 2 at 18.  9 Lars Viellechner, “The Constitution of Transnational Governance Arrangements: Karl Polanyi’s Double Movement in the Transformation of Law” in Christian Joerges & Josef Falke, eds, Karl Polanyi, Globalisation and the Potential of Law in Transnational Markets (Oxford: Hart, 2011) 435 at 443–5. 10 Benedict Kingsbury, “International Law as Inter-Public Law” in HR Richardson & MS Williams, eds, Nomos XLIX: Moral Universalism and Pluralism (New York: NYU Press, 2009) 167 at 188.

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whole society, and to speak to that society’.11 He questions the wisdom of seeking to replace publics with groups of stakeholders,12 noting that ‘interests prove a very fragile foundation for an international community’.13 However, the breakdown of the boundary between public and private need not mean the disappearance of the concept of the public: it remains to serve the vital role of compelling actors to look beyond their own interests and to seek to make their claims compelling to wider audiences. If publicness disappears altogether, stakeholders would simply pursue their private interests, often in competition with one another. As private and public cease to be distinct from one another, different groups of stakeholders will find that they cannot accomplish their aims in isolation from one another; they need instead to be linked into networks that permit the pursuit of overlapping interests. In addition, a normative stance will prove necessary to actors that purport to exercise political authority. Maintaining the public–private distinction would make it necessary to reinforce the distinction between statute and contract, because the regulatory activity of private actors is the province of states functioning in conformity with constitutions. However, Gralf-Peter Calliess and Moritz Renner note the difficulties of maintaining this distinction, partly because of the close interconnections and interactions among ‘public’ and ‘private’ regulators, and because of the difficulties that the insistence on the public/private distinction creates for maintaining the distinction between law and not-law.14 The breakdown between domestic and international gives rise to the multiplication of entities claiming authority to make valid law, many of which possess significant resources and can impose real costs on those who do not accept their authority or run afoul of their rules. The multiplicity of regimes and the very great likelihood of contradiction between bodies of rules are regularly raised as concerns in this respect. Even statebased law, when it is applied beyond what is generally recognized to be the jurisdiction of states, becomes unmoored from a particular polity. It becomes more difficult, in other words, to see the legal rule or an instance of its application as being in the interest of society as a whole, because the society to which it applies is not the nation-state. Nor are the constellations of actors and communities whose interests are affected likely to constitute a coherent group with common projects and objectives, whose members can readily see their own interests being advanced as the interests of the group are advanced. However, this fragmentation of the national culture15 is not a symptom of the breakdown in the distinction between the domestic and the international; it is rather one of its causes. As for the breakdown between statute and contract, the internal constraints imposed by state constitutions and the external constraints imposed by respect for sovereignty make it exceedingly difficult for state power to operate in transnational space – unless, of course, state power is uncoupled from law and manifested in the form of economic, ideological or military force. Actors who require the kinds of prestations (Leistungen) that law can provide16 will not wait for the state to adapt to the rise of the transnational; they will instead provide themselves with the legal rules they require, using the means at their disposal. Because they lack political authority, these rule-making exercises resemble contract rather than statute in that they do not necessarily purport to create regimes to govern physical or sectoral areas; rather, they want to stabilize normative expectations within an often highly circumscribed group of actors, with respect to a specific type of activity. These contractual arrangements can come to closely resemble statutes in important respects. For example, standardization organizations require firms to which they grant accreditation to comply with a 11 Ibid. at 180. 12 Benedict Kingsbury & Megan Donaldson, “From Bilateralism to Publicness in International Law” in Ulrich Fastenrath et al, eds, From Bilateralism to Community Interest: Essays in Honour of Bruno Simma (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011) 79 at 86. 13 Ibid. at 82. 14 Gralf-Peter Calliess & Moritz Renner, “Between Law and Social Norms: The Evolution of Global Governance” (2009) 22 Ratio Juris 260 at 265. 15 Kjaer, “Structural Transformation”, supra note 6 at 94. 16 See Calliess & Renner, supra note 14, particularly at 266 ff, for a discussion of the distinction between the performance (or prestation) and the function of law. Many types of actors and institutions are capable of carrying out one or more of the functions with which law is closely associated, notably dispute resolution and behavioural control, but the law performs those functions in a particular way, distinguishing itself from other institutions or processes such as alternative dispute resolution.

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series of principles and standards, which are drafted in often highly legalistic terms. The processes through which the principles and standards are adopted and certification bestowed or withheld are also highly legalistic. Governance structures and decision-making authority are created through texts that, though they do not closely resemble state constitutions, are clearly intended to fulfil a number of the functions of such constitutions. Actors who are disappointed – stakeholders in the community, firms denied or stripped of accreditation – are provided with various avenues for grievance and appeal.17 Yet these organizations do not purport to exercise sovereignty over economic actors or to have any means of compelling compliance with their standards than appealing to the self-interest of those actors. Unlike states, private regulators such as standardization organizations must convince economic actors to come to the table. In short, the arrangements between the standardizations and the economic actors are captured neither by statute nor contract; they have elements of both. V. Transnational Law and Democratic Principles A. Transnational Law’s Discontents The emergence of transnational law has many implications, which are neatly captured in Regina Kreide’s discussion of de-democratization, de-juridification and de-politicization.18 If these phenomena are the consequences of societal fragmentation rather than of transnational law itself, then the reassertion of statebased law and the reaffirmation of the distinctions described above are not likely avenues. Other means will need to be found of addressing difficulties of the type that Kreide identifies. Processes of de-democratization provoked by transnational law can take many forms: international agencies vetting domestic policies or making decisions that have direct impacts on the rights and interests of private individuals and domestic societies; courts and legislatures in other states seizing jurisdiction over disputes with significant extraterritorial dimensions; and, perhaps most strikingly, the rise of non-state-based law, the most controversial example of which is lex mercatoria. The concern from democratic principles is that those in whose name rules are being interpreted and applied, or those who are affected by those rules, have no meaningful opportunities to participate in the creation of rules and the processes through which they are interpreted. As Kreide puts it, an incongruity emerges between law-makers and subjects.19 A range of possible responses can be envisaged, including the democratization of international law through structures of consultation and representation that would give civil society, notably through NGOs, a greater voice, or the creation of democratic governance structures in transnational space. The range of obstacles to creating representative democratic structures at the international level are well understood; most of the attention therefore focuses on ways to make international and transnational structures more open to the participation of civil society, usually in the form of civil society organizations. But as Viellechner has pointed out, no matter how one structures the category of actors that need to be at the table, someone who has a stake in the outcome of decision-making processes will be left out.20 This is the inevitable result of complexity and interdependence: the polity must be continually reconstituted, its boundaries no longer self-evident. In addition, as discussed below, the main obstacle to broadly inclusive democratic processes at the international level may have to do with the complexity of problems and of the governance structures constructed to address them, privileging the voices of the professional and the expert. Kreide describes de-juridification in terms of an undermining of the separation of powers between law-making and law-enforcement, and more particularly between executive and judiciary. She also reflects 17 Jaye Ellis, “Constitutionalization of Nongovernmental Certification Programs” (2013) 20 Ind J Global Legal Stud 1035. 18 Regina Kreide, “Re-embedding the Market through Law? The Ambivalence of Juridification in the International Context” in Christian Joerges & Josef Falke, eds, Karl Polanyi, Globalisation and the Potential of Law in Transnational Markets (Oxford: Hart, 2011) 41 at 44 ff. 19 Ibid. at 45. 20 Viellechner, supra note 9 at 451–2.

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concerns expressed by Hauke Brunkhorst regarding the colonization of law, notably by money.21 Teubner expresses a similar concern with the notion of ‘corruption’, arguing with respect to lex mercatoria that at present the actors that make the law are not sufficiently distinguished from the actors in whose interest the rules are drafted; the political and legal processes are not sufficiently distinguished.22 Jan Klabbers23 and Martti Koskenniemi24 have also pointed to the dangers that arise when law is seen as a means of pursuing a set of political, economic or other objectives rather than as a system with a logic and objectives of its own. If we accept Viellechner’s argument about the breakdown of distinctions, particularly between public and private, another means of addressing the problem of de-juridification becomes available: namely constitutionalization in transnational space. It is true that ‘law’ created by private actors tends to be far too closely aligned with the interests of those actors,25 but it is not true that this is an inevitable result of the participation of private entities in law-making activities. We will return to this question below in our discussion of the societal constitution. As for de-politicization, Kreide points to two manifestations: first, a shift in the locus of political activity from the public sphere to specialized organizations and agencies such as civil society organizations; and second, ‘a loss of power through the self-actualisation of politics’.26 She goes on: Initially, a relationship between the steering subject, politics, and the steering object, society, existed. Now, this relationship has been severed and revealed a paradox: politics has been loosened from their anchor in national society in order to gain power in a globally-operating economy.27

Another aspect of de-politicization is the collapse of politics into law. Political arenas are meant to provide a space for wide-ranging discussions and debates in which an array of knowledge systems are brought into contact with one another, and in which the consequences of various courses of action can be explored. Political decisions are meant to allow people to make future plans; therefore, they must possess a certain level of stability. At the same time, these decisions ought to be susceptible of being called into question the moment the need for such questioning arises. In addition, the structure of political argumentation and claim-making is not so rigid as to make it difficult for actors to choose the narrative structure they regard as being best adapted to telling their stories.28 Law cannot permit such a fulsome expression of different points of view nor exploration of such a wide range of options; this would make it impossible for law to accomplish relatively quickly and efficiently the tasks it has been assigned by a wide array of legal traditions while at the same time being able to make a plausible claim to be valid for the whole of society. B. Societal Fragmentation – The Dilemma Recast The question arises whether the most negative consequences of de-democratization, de-juridification and de-politicization can be addressed within transnational legal and governance structures. A good way into the dilemma is to consider two aspects of Kreide’s diagnosis: first, the mismatch between authors and subjects of law; and second, the disruption of the relationship between politics and society.

21 Kreide, supra note 18 at 46. 22 Teubner, “‘Global Bukowina’”, supra note 2 at 19. 23 Jan Klabbers, “The Undesirability of Soft Law” (1998) 67 Nordic J Int’l L 381. 24 Martti Koskenniemi, “Constitutionalism as Mindset: Reflections on Kantian Themes about International Law and Globalization” (2007) 8 Theor Inq L 9. 25 Renner, supra note 6; Teubner, “‘Global Bukowina’”, supra note 2. 26 Kreide, supra note 18 at 47 [emphasis in original]. 27 Ibid. 28 I do not suggest that stories, arguments and claims will be given equal voice and weight. The political arena permits a much wider array of discourses than does law, but not an infinite array. Certain voices, certain keywords or certain claims will be heard and coded as valid while others will not, as a result of notions of what counts as a good argument or a defensible claim.

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1. Authors and subjects of law The mismatch between authors and subjects of law can be seen to be the result of economic globalization: footloose capital slips into transnational space to avoid the application of domestic rules, setting up its own (quasi-) legal and judicial frameworks; state-based international organizations run along technocratic and bureaucratic rather than democratic lines and make decisions that have direct effect within states, or which compel states to roll back regulations and policies enacted through democratic processes. But these phenomena occur as a result of governmental action as well. Environmental degradation provides a good example, because it is so often the result of activities that are not wrong, inappropriate or illegal in and of themselves. Much of the time, this damage is caused by private parties, but governments are implicated by sins of commission or omission as well whenever they set high quotas for fisheries exploitation or lax emissions standards, or when they auction carbon credits at bargain-basement prices or authorize industrial activity. Antitrust law, copyright and patent protection, and international adoption are some other examples of domains in which domestic law can have enormous impacts internationally. Of course, there are public international regimes for coordination, harmonization and cooperation on these issues and more. But these regimes suffer democratic deficits of their own. It is true that there are myriad ways of addressing, if not eliminating, the democratic deficits of international regimes. However, these means tend to lean heavily on processes which Kreide has, quite rightly, criticized as contributing to de-politicization, namely reliance on specialized institutions and organizations which, even when they purport (as many civil society organizations do) to speak for society as a whole, are ultimately answerable only to their membership. Many of these organizations work very hard to maintain strong contacts with the communities whose interests they seek, directly or indirectly, to represent, and have governance structures built around representativeness, transparency and accountability. Nevertheless, there are further barriers to broad participation in international law-making in the forms of expert discourses and bureaucracy. Civil society organizations can play an immensely helpful role in seeking to translate expert discourses into ordinary language, but ultimately the prospect of inclusive deliberative processes is severely hampered by the technical nature of the problems and the resulting need for expert knowledge in order to understand and discuss these problems on anything other than a superficial level. There is little alternative to turning to civil society organizations that possess this expert knowledge. These organizations operate at the boundary between expert discourses and ordinary language. Their members seek to develop insights into the needs, interests and perspectives of social groups whom they purport to represent. They cannot act as a bridge between the regime and social groups, however; the processes of translation in which they must engage do not allow for such direct transfers of meaning. 2. Politics and society Turning now to the disruption of the relationship between politics and society, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that blame must be laid at the door of societal fragmentation. As long as the goals of government, and the expectations that citizens have of governments, are modest, it is easier to see the constitution as a means of transforming a society into a polity. As society becomes more complex, however, this image of the constitution becomes more difficult to maintain. Furthermore, it becomes more difficult to conceptualize the connection between deliberation and decision-making. Habermas’s argument that law can operate as a hinge between system and lifeworld29 becomes much harder to accept if law is itself understood as a system, carrying out and observing its own operations and guided by its own logic. As a result, law cannot be wielded as a tool to effect change in a particular sector or category of activity. Law does carry out changes, but it does so by taking up claims and analysing them by its own lights. Furthermore, the conclusions handed down by judges or administrative authorities do not act directly or immediately on the sector to which they are directed; rather, they are taken up and analysed in turn, within the boundaries of other systems. In other words, law can be used to carry out translations between public discourse, on the one hand, and systems which that discourse seeks to affect, such as the economic system. However, the process of translation is laborious, yielding outcomes that

29 Jürgen Habermas, Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy, translated by William Rehg (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1998) at 56.

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can be unpredictable and undesirable. Civil society organizations are often much more effective if they carry out their own translations, for example by appealing to economic logic when interacting with firms. Let us take an example of an international environmental regime that is renowned both for its sophistication and for its openness to civil society: the international climate change regime. The levels of access which civil society organizations have to the regime’s inner workings and to the Conferences and Meetings of the Parties is extremely high relative to most other regimes. It is one of a small but growing number of environmental regimes to possess a fairly elaborate compliance mechanism which seeks, through a range of incentive structures, to bring and keep states in compliance with its obligations. Yet the regime remains highly inaccessible to civil society in many important respects. This inaccessibility comes not from its lack of openness and transparency, or at least not only from that: it is the sophistication and complexity of the regime and its component parts that constitute arguably the greatest hurdle to broad public participation in and around its workings. It is a highly elaborate machine for bringing into close interaction the range of expert discourses that are essential to addressing both the phenomenon of climate change and the governance structures created to address that phenomenon. Arguably, one could make the regime as open as one wanted and the problems posed by the specialized discourses in which the work of the regime – necessarily – takes place would remain an enormous obstacle to accessibility. We therefore must rely on smaller groups of highly informed stakeholders to create links between the regime and civil society. The above discussion sought to illustrate the extent to which the phenomena of de-democratization, dejuridification and de-politicization continue to reappear in different guises as long as transnational law is not squarely addressed. Discourse and deliberation are crucial; the problem lies in understanding how to communicate the conclusions that flow from discursive processes across system boundaries. The maintenance of the autonomy of law, politics and other social systems is equally important; one must then seek mechanisms, such as the societal constitution, discussed below, to determine how to accomplish that. De-democratization is the thorniest problem, though it may be that the approaches to democracy with which we have been operating, particularly at the international level, are to be buried not praised. C. The Societal Constitution There is one type of category distinction that must be maintained in order for the negative impacts of transnational law to be attenuated: the distinction between different social systems. The spectres of depoliticization and de-juridification, also understood as corruption or colonization, must be avoided. Because of the close association between the state and formal law, it is particularly difficult to imagine transnational law as anything other than soft law, which is highly prone to colonization by politics, as Klabbers30 has made clear. What makes the difference is constitutionalization. As noted above, the most important functions of constitutions are to bring law and politics together while ensuring that distance is maintained between them. Secondary rules also serve to put distance between rule-makers and the subjects of rules, largely through governance processes which aim to ensure rigour. Another goal of the governance process is to give the constitution and the regime that is built around it an objective existence. Non-state-based regimes often behave as much like state-based governments as reasonably possible, bestowing upon themselves the trappings of state governments in the form of representative decision-making bodies, processes for the treatment of complaints and grievances, and rules and standards that closely resemble statutes or conventions. Beyond that, they must make up the distance between themselves and state governments in myriad ways: by paying scrupulous attention to issues such as participation rights for a wide range of stakeholders, balanced and extensive consultation on decision-making, close interaction with relevant experts, transparency, and feedback loops that allow the regime to keep a close eye on the impacts, intended and unintended, of the application of their rules and policies. The authority of such regimes must be built up through perceptions among a range of observers that the regimes are legitimate and effective. Kjaer describes the development of ‘hybrid legitimacy’, which emerges through quasi-democratic processes involving, for example, extensive

30 Klabbers, supra note 23.

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consultation with stakeholders,31 proceduralization (namely the application of principles such as participation, transparency, accountability and judicial review)32 and deliberation (in many cases, decision-making is by consensus, and decision-making structures are often designed to foster the reaching of agreement).33 It must be recalled that the societal constitution is not merely the constitutionalization of the private sector, since, as noted above, the private sector is no longer a particularly useful analytical concept. Kingsbury’s notion of inter-public law may be difficult to discern in the transnational governance space described here, but we argue that it has not been left behind entirely. Renner argues, for example, that it is becoming somewhat more difficult for firms and arbitral panels to ignore ‘public’ law that seeks to defend the interests of the groups and communities affected by investment decisions, pointing to a small number of examples in which tribunals have applied legal rules and principles such as necessity and rules against corruption. He does not exaggerate the importance of these still rather isolated examples, but does note that recent moves within ICSID towards greater transparency and openness ‘indicate that transnational economic constitutionalism might, indeed, renew the promise of a legal-political re-embedding of market processes. In this context, it seems to be the very re-embedding of legal argument which structures – and maybe even triggers – the dialectical countermovements against economic liberalization’.34 Christian Joerges calls on Rudolph Wiethölter’s concept of Recht-Fertigung, which requires a demonstration that the production of legal norms ‘deserves recognition’.35 The means to making this determination are beginning to emerge, he argues, for example in the form of conflicts law and the ‘law of law-production’ emerging in Global Administrative Law.36 VI. Conclusion I have sought to demonstrate, first, that the rise of transnational law is the result and not the cause of societal fragmentation; and second, that finding solutions to the dangers and risks posed by transnational law, namely de-democratization, de-juridification and de-politicization, can themselves be addressed not by reverting to the notion of law as produced by states acting under the authority of constitutions but by reconceptualizing the fundamental distinction law/not law without reference to the state. What stands to be lost in this process may have already been lost, as the increasingly complex nature of society calls for increasingly complex governance structures. One of the central threats to democratic principles in this process may not be economic power – certainly a significant threat, but one whose importance is at least clearly recognized – but rather bureaucracy (professionalization) and technocracy (expert discourses). Democracy as we know it – or have imagined it – will no doubt need to adopt different forms. At the international level, where notions of a world polity or community are impossible to realize in anything other than a highly superficial form, heightened attention to transnational networks of actors coming together over particular issue-areas and able to reconfigure themselves depending on the evolving nature of the problems that transnational regimes seek to address, may often result in greater fidelity to democratic principles than current institutions, which focus on states and create limited space for non-state actors.

31 Poul F Kjaer, Between Governing and Governance: On the Emergence, Function and Form of Europe’s PostNational Constellation (Oxford: Hart, 2012) at 132–3. 32 Ibid. at 135 ff. 33 Ibid. at 138–9. 34 Renner, supra note 6 at 431. 35 Christian Joerges, “A New Type of Conflicts Law as the Legal Paradigm of the Postnational Constellation” in Christian Joerges & Josef Falke, eds, Karl Polanyi, Globalisation and the Potential of Law in Transnational Markets (Oxford: Hart, 2011) 465 at 476, citing Rudolph Wiethölter, “Begriffs- oder Interessenjurisprudenz – Falsche Fronten im IPR und Wirtschaftsverfassungsrecht: Bemerkungen zur selbstgerechten Kollisionsnorm” in A Lüderlitz et al, eds, Festschrift für Gerhard Kegel (Frankfurt am Main: Metzner, 1977) 213. 36 Joerges, supra note 35, particularly at 497, referring to Richard B Stewart & Michelle Ratton Sanchez-Badin, “The World Trade Organization and Global Administrative Law” in Christian Joerges & Ernst-Ulrich Petersmann, eds, Constitutionalism, Multilevel Trade Governance and International Economic Law, 2d ed (Oxford: Hart, 2011) 457.

Chapter 12

Non ratione imperii, sed imperio rationis1

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Frédéric Zenati-Castaing

I. Aux origines, le droit autoritatif Le titre de la présente contribution est tiré d’un aphorisme au moyen duquel les historiens du droit interprètent l’œuvre d’un célèbre civilian anglais du XVIIe siècle, Arthur Duck.2 Cet auteur s’est efforcé de persuader l‘opinion anglaise de son temps que le droit romain, qui tentait de s’implanter alors, ne prétendait pas s’imposer par la force, mais seulement par l’autorité. C’était, en fait, le droit savant que visait Duck en parlant du droit romain. Il exprimait cette évidence que la science du droit n’a d’autre arme que celle de l’autorité. Le droit savant rappelle qu’il fut un temps où le droit n’était fait que d’autorité et n’existait pas encore à l’état autoritaire. Les lignes qui suivent tentent de répondre à la question de savoir si le droit de la science peut constituer une alternative au droit de l’Etat. L’esprit moderne a ancré le droit dans l’Etat, d’abord en justifiant l’Etat et son pouvoir par le droit, puis en définissant le droit par l’Etat. Cette vision a engendré une incapacité de concevoir l’existence du droit dans une société dépourvue d’Etat. Il a fallu attendre l’historicisme, puis la sociologie pour dissocier la production du droit du phénomène étatique; il a fallu que naisse l’anthropologie juridique pour se souvenir que le droit préexiste à l’Etat et pouvoir découvrir qu’il continue d’exister sans lui, parallèlement à lui sur son territoire.3 Cette prise de conscience a conduit à relativiser le rôle de la contrainte publique dans le droit et à ne considérer comme satisfaisante son utilisation pour caractériser le droit que dans le cas du droit étatique. Elle permet de concevoir des sociétés organisées dans lesquelles le droit joue son rôle autrement que par la coercition. C’est dire l’importance des sources de l’autorité, comprise comme influence non contraignante. L’histoire des sources du droit révèle que l’autorité a principalement été recherchée dans la coutume et dans la religion. Ces sources sont, à ce point, essentielles qu’elles forment des ingrédients sur lesquels se sont fondés des systèmes juridiques entiers. Mieux, la plupart des systèmes juridiques trouvent dans ces sources purement autoritatives leur origine. Les systèmes de droit coutumier nous sont familiers. Ils ont été le régime de tous les droits d’occident avant les codifications modernes et sont restés le principe de la common law, nonobstant l’avènement de l’Etat–législateur. Il n’y avait pas, initialement, de différence significative entre ces deux familles, qui ont évolué dans le même univers, celui de la chrétienté.4 Les deux reposaient entièrement sur l’autorité, celle qui s’attache aux jugements. Cette autorité procèdait de l’idée simple que ce qui été déclaré juste antérieurement est universel, car donner une solution différente à un cas identique, eût été admettre que cette solution, ou celle 1 « Non pas en raison de la puissance, mais par la puissance de la raison. » 2 Arthur Duck, De usu et authoritate juris civilis romanorum per dominia principium christianorum, Londres, 1653. Voir Alain Wijffels, « Arthur Duck et le ius commune européen » (1990) 10–11 Revue d’histoire des facultés de droit et de la science juridique 193 [Wijffels, « Arthur Duck »]. 3 Voir notamment Norbert Rouland, Anthropologie juridique, Paris, Presses Universitaires de France, coll Droit fondamental, 1988; Norbert Rouland, Aux confins du droit: anthropologie juridique de la modernité, Paris, Odile Jacob, 1991; Jacques Vanderlinden, Anthropologie juridique, Paris, Dalloz, coll Connaissance du droit, 1996. Sur le pluralisme juridique, voir entre autres Rodolfo Sacco, Anthropologie juridique: Apport à une macro-histoire du droit, Paris, Dalloz, 2008 aux pp 55 et s. 4 On sait l’apport qu’a constitué le mouvement de l’école historique allemande dans la reconnaissance du rôle de la coutume dans les sources du droit, au point même de la mettre au fondement de la science du droit dans les systèmes juridiques romanistes. On pourra, sur ces aspects, consulter notamment Alfred Dufour, Droits de l’homme, droit naturel et histoire, Paris, Presses Universitaires de France, coll Léviathan, 1991; Olivier Jouanjan, Une histoire de la pensée juridique en Allemagne (1800–1918), Paris, Presses Universitaires de France, coll Léviathan, 2005.

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qui l’a précédée, était injuste. L’autorité dont les jugements se nourrissaient eux-mêmes était constituée par la coutume sociale, car dans une société traditionnelle, les valeurs que l’on mobilise dans les prétoires sont stables et acquièrent elles-mêmes de l’autorité avec le temps.5 Mais ce n’était pas vraiment la norme sociale qui faisait la coutume, c’était le jugement qui la consacrait (qui l’approuvait, disait-on alors), car cette norme était discutée par les parties.6 A l’autorité de la règle sociale se superposait celle du jugement. La deuxième source dans laquelle on a recherché l’autorité a été la religion.7 Cette source n’est pas vraiment distincte de la précédente, car la coutume et la religion sont indissociables dans un système juridique religieux. Ce qui est juste et ce qui est saint ne se distinguant pas, il allait de soi que la solution d’un litige fût donnée par une instance religieuse. Mais la solution sacrée se nourrissait elle-même de la coutume, même si l’oracle judiciaire était censé traduire la parole divine. C’est pour cette raison que l’on classe les systèmes juridiques qui pratiquent cet oracle, c’est-à-dire la plupart des systèmes juridiques de l’antiquité, parmi les droits coutumiers. Les pontifes romains, qui sont la figure la plus familière de cette manière de produire le droit, faisaient doublement autorité. Ils étaient à la fois les interprètes de la divinité et les gardiens de la coutume. Les jurisconsultes, qui ont pris leur suite, n’en furent que des avatars sécularisés: ils ont troqué l’oracle contre un art consommé de la prudence.8 A côté des systèmes coutumiers pontificaux, est apparue au cours de l’antiquité une forme inédite de production du droit autoritatif, la science du droit. Cet évènement devait avoir un retentissement prodigieux sur l’histoire des sources du droit et sur la conception des systèmes juridiques. L’autorité de la science a été telle, qu’elle a provoqué la naissance d’une nouvelle variété de système juridique, celle des droits doctrinaux. Très différente de celle des jurisconsultes, elle reposait sur la raison, et non plus sur la prudence. La naissance de la science du droit semble liée à l’avènement des religions révélées.9 L’apparition de ce nouveau type de religion dans le monde antique a révolutionné la vision du droit. L’unité de la religion et du droit n’était pas nouvelle, elle était, en ces temps, généralisée. Ce qui était inédit et rompait avec le régime de l’oracle, c’était que la parole divine formulant le droit était désormais contenue dans un texte, et plus précisément dans une loi, considérée comme l’instrument d’une Révélation divine. C’est depuis cette époque que la loi a pris une place de premier plan dans le droit, bouleversant la vision autoritative que l’on avait eu jusqu’alors du droit: la loi devenait l’expression du droit, ce qu’elle n’avait jamais été auparavant, elle devenait même la seule expression du droit. Ce modèle nouveau devait avoir une responsabilité décisive dans l’apparition, bien longtemps après, du droit étatique, un droit de commandements prenant la suite d’un droit immanent qui se discute. Avec la loi sacrée, les usagers ainsi que les ministres du droit sont devenus des interprètes, l’interprétation provoquant la naissance d’une science herméneutique et la formation d’un corps de savants séparés de la pratique. Ces nouveaux acteurs de la vie du droit se distinguaient des fidèles par le fait qu’ils avaient une connaissance érudite et habile de la loi, savoir qui leur conférait une reconnaissance particulière et les habilitait à enseigner à la multitude, incapable, par elle-même, d’accéder de plain-pied à la Révélation, une 5 Voir Frédéric Zenati, La jurisprudence, Paris, Dalloz, 1991 aux pp 19 et s, 140 et s et les références citées. 6 Telle est la thèse fameuse d’Edouard Lambert, produit d’une confrontation du droit romaniste et de la common law: Edouard Lambert, Etudes de droit commun législatif ou de droit civil comparé, Paris, V Giard & E Brière, 1903 aux pp 111 et s, 173 et s [Lambert, Etudes]. Sur l’antériorité du jugement à la coutume, voir Henry Sumner Maine, L’ancien droit considéré dans ses rapports avec l’histoire de la société primitive et avec les idées modernes, traduit par CourcelleSeneuil, Paris, Guillaumin, 1874 aux pp 5 et s. 7 Voir Droit et religion (Archives de philosophie du droit, t 38), Paris, Sirey, 1993; Jacques Ellul, Le fondement théologique du droit, Paris, Dalloz, 2008(réédition); Philippe Chiappini, Le droit et le sacré, Paris, Dalloz, 2006. 8 Le Digeste définit l’art du jurisconsulte (la jurisprudentia) comme la science des choses divines et humaines (Dig 1.1.10 (Ulpien)). Ulpien définit le jurisconsulte comme un prêtre, un prêtre du droit (Dig 1.1.1 § 1). 9 Ce paragraphe est la communication d’une recherche en cours sur la genèse de la science du droit. On se bornera donc ici à quelques repères sommaires. Sur le lien entre savoir et droit hébraïque, comparer Lionel Panafit, « La Halakha comme problématique de la connaissance » dans Frank Alvarez-Pereyre et Lionel Panafit, dir, Le droit interne hébraïque, Presses Universitaires de Strasbourg, 2004, 7. Sur l’analyse du droit musulman comme un droit de juristes, voir GH Bousquet et Joseph Schacht, dir, Selected Works of C Snouck-Hurgronje, édition en français et en anglais, Leyden, EJ Brill, 1957. Sur le rôle du christianisme dans l’apparition du droit savant en occident, voir notamment Harold J Berman, Droit et révolution, traduit par Raoul Audouin, préface par Charles Atias, Aix-en-Provence, Librairie de l’Université d’Aix-enProvence, 2002.

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interprétation autorisée. De là l’idée tout à fait nouvelle d’un enseignement du droit, en tant que science, qui était d’ailleurs l’activité exclusive de ces savants, puisqu’ils n’étaient pas des praticiens. La conception de l’intercession avec la divinité qu’a le droit monothéiste a créé une rupture avec le pontificat du fait de cette notion d’un droit qui s’enseigne: au lieu de la vision ésotérique du système pontifical, faisant du droit divin une connaissance réservée à une minorité et gardée secrète, communiquée parcimonieusement par des oracles. On avait désormais affaire à une connaissance exotérique, qui visait, au contraire, grâce à l’enseignement, à diffuser l’accès au droit et sa compréhension au plus grand nombre.10 Il y avait dans cette vision révolutionnaire du droit le germe d’une nouvelle conception de l’autorité, une autorité fondée, non plus sur la tradition de la pratique contentieuse, mais sur le savoir. Bien qu’il ait inauguré le règne de la loi, le monothéisme a simultanément magnifié l’autorité. Aucun d’entre eux ne pouvant prétendre être l’interprète authentique de la loi, les docteurs ont été conduits à confronter leur interprétation et à la discuter. Ainsi est née la controverse, trait caractéristique de la science du droit. La controverse repose sur la confrontation des autorités, c’est ce qui fait fondamentalement de cette science un phénomène autoritatif. Ce n’est pas le prestige, ni le pouvoir qui donne au savant l’influence dont il jouit. Le docteur de la loi n’appartient, contrairement au pontife, à aucune cléricature et ne participe pas formellement d’un régime politique théocratique: sa force réside dans son seul savoir, dont l’étendue est propre à lui donner une crédibilité supérieure à celle des autres interprètes.11 S’il partage avec le jurisconsulte romain l’autorité du discours, la sienne est très différente; elle n’est pas liée au savoir-faire du praticien, mais au savoir pur, elle est d’essence herméneutique. Le savoir lui permet, grâce à la fiabilité de son interprétation, d’entrer en communication avec la divinité et de découvrir la partie cachée du droit. La connaissance comparée des dispositions éparses de la loi lui permet d’en donner une interprétation éclairée. Dans une conception extensive de son office, sa science de la loi l’autorise à en pénétrer l’esprit et a en dégager la rationalité. La découverte de la raison du droit a décuplé la force de son interprétation. Elle lui a permis, non seulement de bien comprendre la loi divine, mais, parce que cette loi est naturelle, d’expliquer toutes les manifestations extérieures du droit, autres que celles formellement contenues dans le support formel de la loi divine, et de les rassembler sous sa lumière.12 L’immensité des potentialités explicatives et fédératives de la raison de la loi a fait que celui qui la dégageait jouissait d’une autorité incomparable. Grâce à la seule puissance de la raison, imperio rationis, la science du droit a porté l’autorité à un degré sans précédent. En est résultée non seulement la prétention de la science d’expliquer toutes les manifestations du droit positif, voire tous les ordres juridiques, mais jusqu’à la subordination à la raison des droits et des ordres juridiques, y compris ceux soumis à une autorité politique. De la sorte, non seulement l’autorité de la raison n’a rien eu à envier à l’autorité du prince, mais elle a pu même avoir la prétention de la transcender, voire de la soumettre. Elle a fait mieux que libérer le droit de l’Etat, elle l’a hissé au-dessus de l’Etat. Les trois religions révélées ont, avec une remarquable concordance,13 engendré une science du droit. Le judaïsme a été le premier à le faire, en substituant à l’interprétation hiératique du clergé des temps premiers une interprétation savante de la Bible donnée par de simples docteurs, les rabbins.14 S’en est suivie une codification du droit au IIe siècle après J.C., codification dont l’interprétation, à son tour, par les rabbins, a été consignée au VIe siècle dans le Talmud.15 Ce monument n’a pas cessé, depuis lors, de faire l’objet d’une interprétation permanente et renouvelée, ce qui lui a permis de gouverner la vie des fidèles jusqu’à aujourd’hui. La caractéristique de la science du droit juif est d’être fortement exégétique, laissant peu de

10 Voir Raphaël Draï, « Doctrine juridique et éthique de la délibération: L’éclairage talmudique » dans La doctrine juridique, Paris, Presses Universitaires de France, 1993, 112. 11 Max Weber a mis en évidence l’originalité de son statut dans le judaïsme; voir Max Weber, Le judaïsme antique, Paris, Plon, 2008 aux pp 485 et s. 12 Marie-France Renoux-Zagamé, « La méthode du droit commun: réflexion sur la logique des droits non codifiés » (1990) 10–11 Revue d’histoire des facultés de droit et de la science juridique 133. 13 Voir Antoine Schwarz, L’unité cachée: judaïsme, christianisme, islam, préface par O. Valet, Paris, François Bourin, 2012. 14 Voir Weber, supra note 11; Eric Smilevitch, Histoire du judaïsme, Paris, Presses Universitaires de France, 2012. 15 Voir Charles Touati, « La littérature rabbinique » dans Charles Touati, dir, Prophètes, talmudistes, philosophes, Paris, Editions du cerf, 1990, 23.

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place, par souci d’authenticité, à la créativité théorique de ses savants,16 créativité qui s’est épanouie, au contraire, dans les autres monothéismes. Elle est surtout d’avoir produit un droit séparé de tout Etat, qui constitue un ordre juridique concurrent de celui de l’Etat sur le territoire duquel résident les fidèles. Il en résulte qu’elle a été prémunie contre son absorption par l’Etat, danger latent dans les droits doctrinaux (du fait de la place qu’ils réservent à la loi), que les autres monothéismes ne sont pas parvenus à éviter. Son ressort a toujours eu un caractère exclusivement autoritatif et montre qu’un système juridique doctrinal ne dérive pas nécessairement vers un droit étatisé. Pour les mêmes raisons que le judaïsme, l’Islam a provoqué la naissance, à sa suite, d’une science du droit. Il a été le premier à se départir du littéralisme de la science du droit hébreu, en faisant prévaloir l’esprit de la loi sur sa lettre. L’émancipation herméneutique a favorisé une très grande créativité des docteurs, grâce à laquelle ceux-ci ont fondé, avant les docteurs chrétiens, la technique des principes généraux du droit.17 Cette technique leur a permis de dégager un droit commun, non seulement à partir des sources formelles du droit musulman, mais aussi à partir des droits des pays conquis par l’Islam, et donc un droit d’autant plus commun. Grâce à cette démultiplication, la doctrine du droit musulman a porté la puissance de la raison à un niveau tel qu’elle a absorbé tout le droit et s’est imposée à l’Etat, ce qu’elle a été historiquement la première à faire. L’autorité paroxystique qui en est résultée a cependant été affaiblie par le déclin de l’interprétation doctrinale à partir du Xe siècle, déclin qui a quasiment sclérosé la science du droit musulman et l’a empêchée de relever le défi du temps. C’est à cette époque que le christianisme a engendré, à son tour, l’apparition d’une science du droit, celle qui est à l’origine de la fondation d’une partie importante du droit occidental. La tardiveté de l’évènement est liée à l’aversion originelle que cette religion avait eue pour la loi. Ce sentiment s’est littéralement converti en vénération au moyen-âge lorsque, sous l’effet du renouveau de la foi, théologiens et juristes se sont tournés non seulement vers les écritures saintes, mais aussi vers la législation des empereurs chrétiens de Rome, censée constituer le prolongement des sources religieuses. Rome leur est apparue, avec le recul, comme un plan de Dieu destiné à communiquer aux hommes sa conception du droit.18 La dévotion pour les lois ecclésiastiques de Rome a fait naître le droit savant canonique et, de la même manière, la dévotion pour les lois civiles de Rome a fait naitre le droit savant romaniste. Droit romain et droit canonique ont fini par fusionner en une seule science à la fin du moyen-âge, le droit commun. La notion de droit commun dépasse très largement le particularisme binaire du droit chrétien, elle est centrale pour mesurer la force de l’autorité de la science. Comme leurs devanciers arabes, les savants chrétiens du moyen-âge ont construit une théorie du droit transcendant tous les ordres juridiques, un corps de principes généraux dégagés des sources formelles sacrées permettant non seulement d’enrichir le droit révélé en mettant au jour ses données latentes, mais, en plus, d’expliquer tous les ordres juridiques positifs par une grammaire commune et, par réfraction, suggérer que cette grammaire en constitue la sublimation. La théorie du droit commun a changé l’histoire du droit occidental et même, on va le voir plus loin, celle du droit humain dans son ensemble. Cela a été possible, là est la signification de l’aphorisme de Duck placé en tête de cette étude, parce que la science, négligeant la coercition du pouvoir temporel, a fait usage de sa seule autorité cognitive et intellectuelle, l’autorité de la raison. Parce que la science détient la clé de la compréhension du droit divin, sa lecture du droit fait autorité sans qu’il soit besoin, pour qu’elle s’impose, de recourir à la triviale coercition publique.

16 La Bible interdit formellement à l’interprète d’ajouter ou de retrancher au texte (Deutéronome, IV, 1–2). L’interprète ne pouvait donc trouver son salut que dans le texte lui-même, censé être l’expression unique et définitive de la volonté divine: Gabriel Abitbol, Logique du droit talmudique, Paris, Editions des sciences hébraïques, 1993, aux pp 52 et s. 17 Voir Roger Arnaldez, « La loi musulmane à la lumière des sciences coraniques » dans Droit et religion (Archives de philosophie du droit, t 38), Paris, Sirey, 1993, 83; Selim Jahel, « Les principes généraux du droit dans les systèmes arabomusulmans au regard de la technique juridique contemporaine » (2003) 55 RIDC 105. 18 Marie-France Renoux-Zagamé, Du droit de Dieu au droit de l’homme, Paris, Presses Universitaires de France, coll Léviathan, 2003, titre 1, ch 2, « Le droit commun entre providence et raison » aux pp 50 et s.

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II. La conquête du droit par l’autorité de la science La romanisation du droit qui s’est produite dans toute l’Europe à l’époque de Duck ne s’analyse pas tant comme une montée du droit romain que comme une victoire de la science. Le droit savant a cessé d’être purement universitaire, comme il l’avait été au moyen-âge, et donc de constituer une simple source parmi d’autres, il a conquis la pratique et lui a communiqué sa conception du droit. Il a absorbé le droit, en lui communiquant sa vision ambiguë, à la fois autoritative et législative. Ce processus, que je qualifierai d’épistémisation du droit,19 est ignoré de l’historiographie et de l’histoire en France, où l’on se contente de parler de romanisation. Il est restitué de manière explicite en Allemagne, contrée où la conquête savante qui s’est produite au XVIe siècle fut tellement brutale qu’elle ne pouvait pas passer inaperçue. On y parle, à ce sujet, de scientification du droit.20 Ce phénomène est inhérent au destin de la science du droit, par-delà l’expérience du droit occidental. Il s’est produit semblablement dans l’histoire du droit musulman. La particularité du droit savant de la chrétienté est que son extension s’est opérée paradoxalement au moment de sa sécularisation, avec les temps modernes. Loin de provoquer le déclin de la science du droit et de son autorité, cette mutation a, au contraire, favorisé son expansion et sa généralisation. Cette évolution inattendue s’explique par le fait que le droit n’a pas cessé, au début de l’époque moderne, d’être métaphysique, c’est un point important pour la compréhension des conclusions de cette étude, la Renaissance a substitué au droit divin un droit naturel.21 Le droit naturel qu’avait déjà célébré la scolastique médiévale n’était plus le droit de Dieu, il est devenu le droit humain reconnu par Dieu, mais il était toujours aussi transcendant et nécessitait plus que jamais le ministère des savants pour être découvert. L’épistémisation du droit occidental a emprunté des voies multiples. La réception pure et simple a été la forme qu’elle a prise dans les Etats allemands et dans une grande partie de l’Europe, y compris la partie méridionale de la France. Le droit savant a, dans ces régions, pris la suite du droit coutumier, qui se trouvait à l’état de coutume romaine, comme en France, ou à l’état de droit purement local, comme dans les pays allemands.22 C’est bien de la réception du droit savant (du jus commune, prenant la suite du jus proprium, le droit local), qu’il s’agissait, et non pas simplement de la réception du droit romain, comme on le dit inexactement en France. Cette réception n’a pas pu se faire sans un minimum de dilution. Le droit savant s’est particularisé au contact du droit local et le recours au droit naturel a favorisé cette symbiose. C’est ce que l’on a appelé l’usus modernum pandectarum, un droit commun aux couleurs locales, mais rendu très abstrait par l’esprit moderne.23 La réception pure et simple ne pouvait pas avoir lieu dans les rares pays qui, comme la France, avaient codifié leurs coutumes. C’est une autre voie qui y fut empruntée, dont on va voir qu’elle est beaucoup plus intéressante pour comprendre le destin actuel de la science du droit. Cette voie a consisté à parachever la romanisation qui avait été amorcée et esquissée par la rédaction des coutumes à la fin du moyen-âge. 19 C’est une des thèses soutenues dans l’essai dont le présent article constitue la communication. Sur la continuité du droit médiéval et du droit moderne grâce au droit savant, voir Alain Wijffels,« Qu’est-ce que le ius commune? » dans Alain Wijffels, dir, Le Code civil entre ius commune et droit privé européen, Bruxelles, Bruylant, 2005 à la p 643. 20 L’idée a été avancée pour la première fois par Franz Wieacker, à propos de l’ensemble du droit romaniste, le Corpus juris: Franz Wieacker, « Das Corpus Iuris Justinians » (1942) 102 Zeitschrift für die gesamte Staatswissenschaft 444. Les historiens du droit allemand contemporains s’accordent à penser que la réception du droit romain s’est accompagnée d’un changement des méthodes qui a entrainé la « scientification » de la vie juridique, au point que l’on considère que le mot réception peut apparaître inexact. Voir sur tous ces points Udo Wolter, « La réception du droit romain dans les pays germaniques à la fin du moyen-âge et ses répercussions sur la pensée juridique européenne » (1992) 13 Revue d’histoire des facultés de droit et de la science juridique 91. 21 Sur l’idée que la laïcité et les droits de l’homme (donc le droit naturel) sont des avatars de la métaphysique occidentale, voir Chiappini, supra note 7; Simone Goyard-Fabre, « L’hésitation conceptuelle du jusnaturalisme de Hobbes à Wolff » (1989) 8 Revue d’histoire des facultés de droit et de la science juridique 51. Dans un autre esprit, on considère le droit naturel comme un âge qu’atteint tout système juridique qui sort de sa première phase, dont le caractère est nécessairement religieux: Jacques Ellul, Le fondement théologique du droit, Paris, Dalloz, 2008 aux pp 11 et s. 22 Voir Jean Gaudemet, Les naissances du droit: Le temps, le pouvoir et la science au service du droit, 4e éd, Paris, Montchrestien, 2006 aux pp 194 et s. 23 Voir Franz Wieacker, A History of Private Law in Europe, traduit par Tony Weir, Oxford, Clarendon, 2003 aux pp 159 et s [Wieacker, History].

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Le droit coutumier a été construit par ses interprètes de manière synthétique, comme un droit uniforme pour l’ensemble du pays. Cela a commencé par une interprétation comparée des différentes coutumes, puis s’est poursuivi par la rédaction, à partir du plan des corps de droit romain, de traités contenant les principes généraux communs auxdites coutumes.24 Le droit français qui est résulté de cette alchimie était un avatar du droit savant médiéval. Non seulement il comportait de nombreux emprunts matériels à cette tradition et une utilisation formelle de ses structures d’exposé, mais, surtout, il était la traduction même de l’idée de droit savant, celle d’un droit commun, comme en atteste d’ailleurs l’utilisation qui a été faite de la notion de droit commun pour désigner les ouvrages de droit français (« droit commun de la France »). Forts de l’idée léguée par le droit savant médiéval que les jura propria contenaient, eux aussi, une raison commune, autant que les lois romaines, on s’est enquis de révéler cette raison. Les savants-praticiens qui ont fabriqué le droit français se sont proposés de rechercher une nouvelle raison écrite dans l’esprit des coutumes. Le droit commun qui en est résulté n’était nouveau qu’en apparence. Non seulement il était destiné, comme le précédent, à transcender la multitude, mais il était, comme lui, censé formuler un droit supra-humain, le droit naturel, avatar du droit divin que les médiévaux avait cherché à formuler à travers le jus commune. La science du droit accomplissait là de nouveau sa mission de révéler le droit de la transcendance, elle pérennisait son autorité, voire la faisait culminer en absorbant tout le droit. Le règne de l’autorité s’est établi, selon ces deux voies, dans toute l’Europe, y compris l’Angleterre,25 sans que la souveraineté des Etats en fût affectée, telle est la signification de l’œuvre de Duck, lequel a parfaitement compris la transformation d’ampleur qui s’opérait à son époque. Mais Duck s’est en partie trompé sur la vocation à durer de ce nouvel ordre autoritatif, car c’est l’autorité de l’Etat qui devait finir par l’emporter, du moins dans un premier temps, sur l’autorité de la raison. C’est là que les chemins de la common law et du jus commune se sont séparés. Dans les pays de droit commun, le triomphe de la science a fait le lit de la loi, alors que son échec dans les iles britanniques a épargné à la justice le règne de la loi. La vision savante du droit a imposé aux praticiens du continent la rigueur du raisonnement scientifique et l’abandon de la rhétorique des prétoires. Toute espèce devait être rigoureusement qualifiée au moyen d’une règle de droit et solutionnée par sa seule application. Le droit est devenu apodictique et donc plus certain. La littérature juridique a évolué profondément. Faisant écho aux traités de droit commun de la France, les recueils de la pratique sont devenus des répertoires abandonnant le style des recettes de palais au profit d’une architecture rigoureuse contenant une présentation exhaustive et concise des sources du droit sur une question donnée.26 Son pouvoir augmentant, le prince a lui-même participé au mouvement et a succombé à l’ascension du modèle scientifique en prenant des ordonnances créant des corps de droit officiels sur certaines matières, sans, cependant, que fût encore à l’ordre du jour la transformation de l’ensemble du droit autoritatif en droit autoritaire. Bref, si cette mutation ne s’est pas accomplie, les conditions en étaient néanmoins déjà réunies. La science du droit, sans le vouloir, a, par la logique qui est la sienne, et le modèle qui s’en dégageait, préparé le règne de la loi étatique, bien que telle ne fût pas sa vocation. La mutation qu’elle a subie à l’époque moderne y est pour beaucoup. Le rationalisme a transformé le droit savant en lui retirant sa dimension d’autorité. Alors qu’au moyen-âge, comme dans tous les droits monothéistes, l’interprétation du docteur était une opinion et se confrontait à celle des autres docteurs dans la controverse, avec le rationalisme, l’interprétation est devenue certaine.27 Le syllogisme réinventé par les médiévaux s’est radicalisé dans sa dimension axiomatique: l’interprétation est devenue unique. Le jusnaturalisme moderne a 24 Voir la revue Droits (2003–04), n°38–9, sur la « Naissance du droit français ». Sur le comparatisme coutumier, voir Jean-Louis Thireau, « Le comparatisme et la naissance du droit français » (1990) 10–11 Revue d’histoire des facultés de droit et de la science juridique 153. 25 Où les civilians ont tenté de construire une science du droit nationale, comme l’ont tenté les auteurs coutumiers français: voir Wijffels, « Arthur Duck », supra note 2. Sur l’implantation du droit savant dans l’Angleterre médiévale, voir Henri Lévy-Ullmann, Le système juridique de l’Angleterre, Paris, Panthéon-Assas, 1999 aux pp 53 et s; Theodore FT Plucknett, A Concise History of the Common Law, Indianapolis, Liberty Fund, 2010 aux p 294 et s. 26 Voir Jean-Louis Thireau, « L’enseignement du droit et ses méthodes au XVIe siècle, continuité ou rupture? » (1985) 2 Annales d’histoire des facultés de droit et de la science juridique 51; Serge Dauchy et Véronique Demars-Sion, dir, Les recueils d’arrêts et dictionnaires de jurisprudence (XVIe–XVIIIe siècles), Paris, Mémoire du droit, 2005. 27 Dufour, supra note 4 aux pp 99 et s; Michel Villey, La formation de la pensée juridique moderne, Paris, Presses Universitaires de France, coll Léviathan, 2003 aux pp 489 et s.

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agi dans le même sens. Il assignait au docteur, et plus généralement à l’homme, le pouvoir de révéler le droit par sa seule raison, sans qu’il fût besoin d’une élaboration collective. La confiance en la raison était illimitée: la raison devait permettre de découvrir un droit indiscutable, ce qui ouvrait la voie au droit autoritaire.

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III. L’étatisation du droit En codifiant le droit, le prince n’a, au fond, fait que donner une couleur législative à l’œuvre savante.28 Il a repris à son compte la méthode doctrinale des corps de droit et il s’en est servi pour mettre en forme le droit savant modernisé et nationalisé depuis le XVIe siècle. L’interprétation qu’appelait ce nouveau droit ne pouvait elle-même que devenir apodictique et authentique.29 Le droit autoritatif avait donc vocation à disparaître, y compris la science du droit, qui n’avait plus aucun rôle à jouer du fait du caractère désormais officiel de l’interprétation. Dans la common law, la science, qui avait pratiquement disparu, ne pouvait connaître ni cet honneur, ni cette indignité. L’étatisation du droit ne pouvait pas, en l’absence de droit savant, y prendre la forme d’une codification. Mais elle a consisté pareillement en la substitution d’un droit autoritaire à un droit autoritatif. Les instances juridictionnelles suprêmes ont été unifiées et ont vu leurs attributs renforcés. Les précédents sont devenus, comme les codes, des règles obligatoires. En un mot, le droit s’est trouvé pétrifié par le juge au lieu de l’être par le législateur. La codification a donc canonisé le droit savant tout en provoquant sa péremption. La transformation de l’autorité en loi ne pouvait qu’être fatale à la doctrine, qui n’a fait que survivre depuis lors. En tout cas, cet évènement a changé le régime des sources du droit en substituant à la science la règle étatique. La science du droit, qui est au cœur du droit romaniste, ne pouvait cependant pas disparaître sans autre forme de procès. Elle s’est frayée une place dans le nouveau régime des sources en tentant de faire porter son action interprétative sur la loi de l’Etat, ce qui n’a pas duré du fait de l’accaparement de l’interprétation par l’Etat et de l’entrée en crise de la loi à la fin du XIXe siècle. Elle a alors reporté son office herméneutique sur l’interprétation authentique, elle s’est assignée une interprétation de deuxième main, en quelque sorte.30 D’une manière générale, son activité de conceptualisation et de systématisation a été considérablement bridée par un environnement normatif désormais rigide et, peu propice à l’autorité. Elle l’a été également par une nouvelle philosophie adaptée à l’Etat, le positivisme, qui lui a interdit toute prétention normative et a dénié toute valeur à ses constructions, ce qui était incompatible avec la poursuite du droit commun. Si sa canonisation législative a provoqué son étiolement dans l’ordre interne, il n’en a cependant pas été de même dans l’ordre international, où la codification a paradoxalement produit l’effet d’une diffusion spectaculaire de la science occidentale dans le monde entier. Paradoxalement, la codification l’a propulsée au-delà des frontières au moment où elle provoquait, à l’intérieur, son dépérissement.31 Le contenu savant des 28 Carl Schmitt, « La situation de la science européenne du droit » (1991) 14 Droits 115 spécialement à la p 124. 29 Avec le droit moderne, la loi ne doit plus être interprétée de manière scientifique, mais par la simple recherche de la volonté du législateur: Michel Bastit, Naissance de la loi moderne, Paris, Presses Universitaires de France, coll Léviathan, 1990 à la p 19. L’interprétation quitte le domaine de la science pour entrer dans la sphère de la politique. L’interprétation n’est plus un acte de connaissance, mais un acte de puissance et de volonté: Benoît Frydman, Le sens des lois, Bruxelles, Bruylant-LGDJ, 2007 à la p 139. 30 Voir Christophe Jamin, « Les intentions des fondateurs » [2002] RTD civ 646; Frédéric Zenati, « L’avenir des revues juridiques et la séparation de la théorie et de la pratique » [2002] RTD civ 691; Nader Hakim, « Le miroir de l’autorité: l’instrumentalisation de l’autorité dans la doctrine contemporaine » (2007) 27 Revue d’histoire des facultés de droit et de la science juridique 459. 31 La littérature sur le rayonnement international du Code civil est immense. Voir, entre autres, Travaux de la semaine internationale de droit: L’influence du Code civil dans le monde, Paris, Pedone, 1950; Le Code civil français et le dialogue des cultures juridiques, Bruxelles, Bruylant, 2007; Thierry Revet, dir, Code civil et modèles: Des modèles du code au code comme modèle, Paris, LGDJ, 2005; Régine Beauthier et Isabella Rorive, dir, Le Code Napoléon, un ancêtre vénéré? Mélanges offert à Jacques Vanderlinden, Bruxelles, Bruylant, 2004. Pour un aperçu du rayonnement du Bürgerliches Gesetzbuch, voir Wieacker, History, supra note 23 aux pp 383 et s. Sur l’influence du Code civil suisse, voir Jean-Philippe Dunand, « Les origines et le rayonnement du Code civil suisse » dans Le centenaire du Code civil suisse, Paris, Société de législation comparée, 2008, 9. Sur l’influence du Code civil québécois, voir Aline Grenon, « Codes et codifications: dialogue avec la common law? » (2005) 46:1–2 C de D 53; Esther Arroyo I Amayuelas, « Le Code civil catalan: choix,

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codes, nonobstant leur transformation en loi, a continué d’incarner le droit commun, le perpétuant de la sorte, et a donc transcendé les nations. Par un phénomène inattendu, les codes, malgré leur nature d’instruments législatifs, sont devenus des instruments de diffusion et de propagation de l’autorité de la science, en tant que recueils du droit commun. L’Etat a, dans un processus subtil, été le vecteur de l’autorité de la doctrine. Avec l’importation des codes, la science du droit s’est imposée à des nations entières, une fois de plus par la force de la raison et non pas en raison de la force. Les codes ont été importés spontanément, ils ne se sont pas imposés par la contrainte comme ils l’avaient fait sur leur territoire, ils ont conquis les peuples par la raison, a une époque où l’esprit moderne incitait à considérer le droit comme universel et donc applicable en tous lieux. Paradoxalement, ils ont servi la science du droit. Ils ont été les porte-voix d’une science, certes nationale, mais non moins universaliste grâce à son naturalisme et à sa prétention persistante à formuler le droit commun. Rendant avec humilité hommage à la science, les Etats récepteurs se sont inclinés devant son droit autoritatif, consacrant de manière spectaculaire l’autonomie du droit par rapport à l’Etat et le caractère contingent du droit étatisé. Les savants n’ont donc pas cessé de poursuivre l’œuvre du droit commun, leur œuvre, malgré leur dépossession.32 Mais l’autorité internationale de leur œuvre n’a pas, en fin de compte, profité à la science, elle a tourné à l’avantage de l’Etat. Ce sont plus les élites qui ont été séduites par la science du droit occidentale, que les peuples. Les Etats qui ont importé les codes ont, comme ceux qui les ont exportés, finalement imposé cette science comme droit de l’Etat, de manière autoritaire. Ils ont fait dans l’ordre international ce qu’avait fait l’Etat dans l’ordre interne, transformer la science en loi. Ils s’en sont servis autant dans un but d’unification du droit, et donc afin d’asseoir leur pouvoir, que dans un but de modernisation. La science du droit a été le moyen de contribuer à la constitution d’Etats-nations. Son œuvre a été plus un instrument d’acculturation et d’oppression à l’étranger qu’elle l’avait été dans son terroir. Ce mélange d’effet autoritatif et de droit autoritaire résume l’aventure de la canonisation législative de la science occidentale du droit à l’époque moderne: en étant instrumentalisée par le prince, la doctrine a vu ses œuvres dénaturées. La même ambiguïté se retrouve dans le renouveau du droit commun qu’a favorisé l’essor du droit comparé au XXe siècle. La science du droit ne pouvait qu’être mobilisée par le mouvement d’unification du droit qui s’est amorcé à cette époque, car ce mouvement touchait à sa raison d’être, le droit commun. Cela l’a conduite à rénover le droit comparé, qui a cessé d’être ce qu’il avait été au XIXe siècle, une science évolutionniste en marge du droit, d’intérêt essentiellement spéculatif et d’esprit nationalitaire. La nouvelle discipline est devenue une véritable doctrine, c’est-à-dire un savoir consistant à extraire des lois un droit commun. Elle a constitué, par sa seule existence, un défi aux sciences juridiques nationales des Etats issues de la fragmentation du droit savant médiéval, un retour aux sources, dans un univers étatisé. Cependant, il ne pouvait s’agir d’une subversion de l’ordre étatique, devenu désormais la règle. Il n’était pas question de revenir à un droit sans Etat, mais seulement, par le recyclage de la méthode du droit commun, d’aider les Etats à ouvrir leurs frontières, à partager ce qui peut être partagé dans leur droit et à mieux se comprendre. Cette idée d’une réhabilitation de la science commune a été expressément conceptualisée, sous une forme rénovée en France par Saleilles33 et par Lambert34 au début du XXe siècle. L’époque de Saleilles et de Lambert était celle d’un rapprochement balbutiant des droits nationaux, dont les schémas exerçaient sur les esprits toute la puissance de leur modèle. Ce droit commun renaissant, cette science internationale du droit que Lambert finalités et transplantations législatives du Code civil québécois » (2005) 46:1–2 C de D 271; Julio César Rivera, « Le projet de code civil pour la République argentine » (2005) 46:1–2 C de D 295. Sur les hypothèses de diffusion du Code civil néerlandais, voir Jan M van Dunné, « ‘Lawyer’s Paradise’ or ‘Paradise Lost’? The Dutch Civil Code of 1992 as an Exponent of the 19th Century Legislative Tradition » dans Régine Beauthier et Isabella Rorive, dir, Le Code Napoléon, un ancêtre vénéré? Mélanges offerts à Jacques Vanderlinden, Bruxelles, Bruylant, 2004, 337. 32 Les conquêtes napoléoniennes ont amené la création de facultés françaises à l’étranger. Voir Anne-Marie Voutyras, « Les facultés de droit dans les départements étrangers de l’empire napoléonien » (1994) 15 Revue d’histoire des facultés de droit et de la science juridique 127. D’une manière générale, les professeurs français ont joui d’une audience remarquable hors des frontières, notamment par une participation aux processus de codification. Voir L’influence des facultés françaises de droit outre-mer et à l’étranger, (1994) 15 Revue d’histoire des facultés de droit et de la science juridique. 33 Raymond Saleilles, « Le Code civil et la méthode historique » dans Le Code civil, 1804–1904, Livre du centenaire du Code, Vaduz (Liechtenstein), Topos, 1992, 128 (qui prédit l’avènement d’une science juridique universelle). 34 Lambert, Etudes, supra note 6, Introduction, « La fonction du droit civil comparé » à la p 1.

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a consacré ardemment sa vie à construire, n’était pas encore, à une époque où la soft law n’existait pas, un droit en soi, mais seulement une notion au service de la préparation d’instruments internationaux.35 La force persuasive, qui est de l’essence de la science du droit, n’était qu’une force persuadant les Etats. Lambert était marqué par l’ordre issu de l’étatisation du droit, un ordre dans lequel la science n’est que l’auxiliaire de la production du droit par le prince. Mais l’intuition était remarquable, en plein Léviathan, d’une mission historique redécouverte de la doctrine. Aller jusqu’au bout de cette intuition supposait de se ressourcer à la nature extra-étatique du droit commun et à sa vocation à transcender les ordres juridiques, non pas à les servir. IV. Le retour de l’autorité de la raison Le mouvement d’internationalisation du droit qui s’est produit au XXe siècle n’a été que le prélude à une rupture plus radicale avec l’ordre juridique étatique, la mondialisation du droit. Ce mouvement est d’une nature différente, il ne consiste plus à introduire dans l’ordre interne des éléments dépendant d’autres droits étatiques, mais à concevoir sans l’entremise des Etats un droit à l’usage de communautés non spécifiquement étatiques, voire de la communauté mondiale dans son ensemble. Parce qu’elle nécessite un savoir de nature non positive, tendant à découvrir une rationalité immanente et donc, d’un certain point de vue, métaphysique, cette tâche est objectivement du ressort de la science du droit, laquelle est née d’une recherche de la transcendance et s’est développée par une sublimation de la rationalité du droit animant plusieurs droits. Par la puissance de la raison, la science a historiquement hissé son droit au-dessus des autorités politiques qu’elle a inféodées. Tel était l’ordre antérieur à l’étatisation du droit, tel est l’ordre qui se dessine à nouveau avec le déclin des Etatsnations, suggérant que les codifications nationales n’auront été qu’une parenthèse. Le retour de l’autorité de la raison s’est amorcé au milieu du XXe siècle sous l’influence de l’avènement d’une communauté mondiale distincte des Etats. Comme dans toutes les formes de sociétés, le droit apparaît dans la société civile planétaire avec le délit et les besoins du commerce. La découverte au XXe siècle des crimes contre l’humanité a révélé l’existence d’une criminalité à laquelle la répression étatique était inadaptée. Il a fallu non seulement créer une juridiction pénale spécifique pour la juger mais aussi un corps de normes adapté à cette dimension. Du fait du caractère inédit de ce droit, on a trouvé dans le statut de la Cour internationale de justice, qui autorise le juge international à se référer, outre la coutume et aux traités, aux principes généraux de droit international, un fondement permettant de construire un droit pénal mondial.36 L’extraction par les juges de ces principes à partir des droits nationaux n’était autre que le recyclage de la méthode savante du droit commun. Peu après, le développement de l’arbitrage international sous l’effet de l’expansion sans précédent du commerce transfrontalier, a fait naitre le besoin de compléter les usages insuffisants du commerce international: ici encore, les arbitres n’ont pas trouvé, pour ce faire, d’autre méthode que celle des principes généraux, consistant à dégager un dénominateur commun des droits nationaux. Ainsi a commencé l’épopée de la lex mercatoria, celle d’un droit radicalement étranger à l’ordre étatique et construit par des juges mettant notamment en œuvre la méthode du droit commun.37 Dans toutes ces occurrences, non seulement la méthode de production du droit est la même, mais le droit en lui-même est, dans les deux cas, méta-étatique. Le juge ne l’applique pas en raison de sa force contraignante, mais par la force de la raison qui s’en dégage. Avant même ce mouvement à l’échelle planétaire, s’était produit déjà, dès le début du XXe siècle, un renouveau de la méthode du droit commun aux Etats-Unis. Héritier de Duck (les civilians ont prospéré outre-Atlantique38), le droit de cette nation participe plus de la nature d’un système juridique mixte que

35 Edouard Lambert, « Sources du droit comparé ou supranational. Législation uniforme et jurisprudence comparative » dans Recueil d’études sur les sources du droit en l’honneur de François Gény, t 3, Paris, Sirey, 1934, 478. 36 Julie Daniel, Les principes généraux du droit en droit pénal interne et international, thèse de doctorat, Université Lyon 3, 2006 [non publiée]; Julie Daniel, « Les principes généraux du droit en droit pénal » dans Sylvie Caudal, dir, Les principes en droit, Paris, Economica, 2008, 275. 37 Filali Osman, Les principes généraux de la Lex mercatoria, Paris, LGDJ, 1992. 38 Voir Gino Gorla, « Samuel Livermore (1786–1833): An American Forerunner to the Modern ‘Civil Law-Common Law Dialogue’ » dans David S Clark, dir, Comparative and Private International Law: Essays in Honor of JH Merryman, Berlin, Duncker & Humblot, 1990, 121.

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de la common law pure.39 Ayant été touchée, comme tous les Etats modernes, par l’autorité de la science allemande, cette nation a connu une réception significative du droit romaniste à la fin du XIXe siècle.40 Lui est donc venue l’idée de codifier la common law, pour la rendre plus certaine et plus fiable. A été entreprise, au début du XXe siècle, une codification savante, qui a dégagé un droit commun à tous les Etats de l’union prenant la forme d’ouvrages consacrés aux principaux domaines du droit, le Restatement of the Law.41 Bien que très proches des besoins de la pratique, ces ouvrages sont d’authentiques œuvres savantes. Ils ne se contentent pas de recueillir la coutume, ils en extraient la rationalité et la systématisent. Pour autant, ils n’ont pas de vocation à une codification législative, car les codes, en Amérique, sont conçus plus comme des autorités que comme des règles contraignantes. Les Etats-Unis ont conservé l’influence de la nature autoritative du droit coutumier antérieur à la mise en place du précédent obligatoire. La règle de droit ne s’y impose pas par la contrainte, mais par la force de la persuasion, parce qu’elle apparait juste. Ce trait est fondamental. Il est la clé de la compréhension du retour au droit autoritatif qui se dessine aujourd’hui sous toutes les latitudes. Les restatements américains ne sont pas seulement des ouvrages systématisés et conceptualisés, ils sont aussi conçus, notamment avec leurs gloses explicatives et illustratives, pour donner lieu à une interprétation dialogique. La texture des dispositions est ouverte et leur esprit est d’offrir un langage commun, un cadre de référence, un repère, plus qu’une règle ferme. Il ne s’agit pas de révéler une volonté supérieure, mais de rechercher la valeur de justice. Cette révélation ne se fait pas, pour autant, par la seule confrontation des points de vue des parties, comme dans les droits coutumiers et dans la théorie déclaratoire de la common law, mais par l’interprétation dialogique d’un texte abstrait, à la manière médiévale, en quelque sorte. Le texte est lui-même une source autoritative et son interprétation se fait sur un mode autoritatif. Ces caractères le rendent inapte à la codification législative, ce qui explique que les restatements soient demeurés à l’état de codifications savantes. Ces ouvrages ont, sans le savoir, ressuscité la tradition autoritative du droit savant antérieure aux codifications publiques, celle d’un droit commun transcendant les droit particuliers en les animant par l’autorité de la raison. Avec eux, le droit commun a cessé d’être le monopole du droit romaniste, il inclut désormais la common law, qui est, par là, enfin devenue un vrai droit commun. Cette expérience ne pouvait pas demeurer enfermée dans les frontières d’un Etat dont la culture est hégémonique dans le monde. Elle a impulsé un processus mondial et régional de retour au droit savant qui s’est inscrit dans un mouvement général de déclin du droit étatique. Dans les années 1960, alors que le processus des restatements était en plein essor, le Uniform commercial code (UCC), issu de ce mouvement, était en cours d’adoption par les Etats américains. L’idée est naturellement venue de transposer cette méthode dans l’ordre mondial. Elle a été lancée en 1968 par le secrétaire de L’Institut international pour l’unification du droit privé (UNIDROIT). Cette suggestion était incongrue dans une organisation interétatique issue de la défunte Société des nations, dont la raison d’être était de procéder à l’unification internationale selon la méthode traditionnelle du droit contraignant des traités. Elle n’était cependant pas le produit d’une opinion isolée. A la même époque, René David lançait dans la partie introductive de l’encyclopédie internationale de droit comparé un appel à abandonner la méthode traditionnelle d’unification au profit d’un retour à celle du jus commune.42 Il critiquait l’approche législative des pionniers du comparatisme consistant à reproduire à l’échelle internationale la méthode du droit commun utilisée par les Etats modernes pour unifier leur droit coutumier, parce que cette méthode reposait sur le présupposé de l’apparition, à terme, d’une entité étatique supranationale reproduisant 39 Voir Shael Herman, « Historique et destinée de la codification américaine » (1995) 47 RIDC 707; Denis Tallon, « La codification dans le système de common law » (1998) 27 Droits 39. 40 Voir Mathias Reimann, The Reception of Continental Ideas in the Common Law World, 1820–1920, Berlin, Duncker & Humblot, 1993. A propos de l’influence de la science allemande sur le mouvement américain des restatements dont il est question ci-dessous, voir John H Merryman et Rogilio Pérez-Perdomo, The Civil Law Tradition: An Introduction to the Legal Systems of Europe and Latin America, 3e éd, Stanford, Stanford University Press, 2007, aux pp 66–7. 41 Sur les restatements, voir Arthur Rosett, « Unification, Harmonization, Restatement, Codification and Reform in International Commercial Law » (1992) 40:3 Am J Comp L 683; Richard Hyland, « The American Restatements and the Uniform Commercial Code » dans Arthur S Hartkamp et al, dir, Towards a European Civil Code, 2e éd, Nijmegen, La Haye, Boston; Ars Aequi Libri, Kluwer, 1998, 55. 42 René David, « The Unification of Private Law » dans International Encyclopedia of Comparative Law, vol 2: The Legal Systems of the World: Their Comparison and Unification, ch 5, 7.

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le schéma de l’Etat, ce qui était un rêve, et même, selon lui, un mauvais rêve. Par réalisme, pour ménager la souveraineté des Etats-nations, il montrait la voie d’un retour au droit persuasif, au droit autoritatif, en l’adaptant aux temps nouveaux. Un droit rédigé en aucun cas par les Etats, mais par la doctrine comparatiste, dégageant la raison écrite des lois nationales, et conçu de manière à être acceptable par les Etats. C’est cet élan qui a réveillé la science du droit de sa torpeur et l’a fait prendre en main sa nouvelle mission, ou, plus exactement, qui a provoqué la cristallisation d’un noyau de doctrine mondiale. En 1971, UNIDROIT a pris la décision officielle d’intégrer dans son programme de travail un essai d’unification du droit général des contrats en vue de la codification progressive du droit du commerce international. L’idée, bien que non explicite, était de rédiger un restatement des contrats à l’échelle internationale. Un comité pilote restreint représentatif des différentes familles de systèmes juridiques, incluant notamment René David, fut chargé d’effectuer les études préliminaires sur la faisabilité d’un tel projet. En 1980, UNIDROIT créa un groupe de travail composé des meilleurs experts mondiaux en droit des contrats et en droit du commerce international, pour la plupart universitaires, sans considération de la représentation des Etats. Cette commission a comparé le droit des contrats d’un grand nombre de pays, tout particulièrement les dernières codifications, adoptées ou en cours, notamment l’UCC, le Code civil algérien de 1975 et les projets en cours de Code civil québécois et de Code civil néerlandais. Elle en a extrait la substance, non pas en formulant des principes censés représenter la conception majoritaire des Etats, mais ceux qui, à leurs yeux d’experts, apparaissaient les plus appropriés aux besoins du commerce international, et qui étaient susceptibles, en tant que tels, d’emporter la conviction des usagers. Ces principes sont, comme le veut la tradition du droit commun, abstraits, rédigés dans un style concis et clair, indépendant des langages techniques nationaux, tout en reproduisant la méthode dialogique des restatements, par la rédaction de gloses explicatives et illustratives.43 Peu après la création de ce groupe de travail, des universitaires européens ont, sous la direction du professeur Lando, de l’Ecole de commerce de Copenhague, et, avec l’appui officieux des autorités européennes, entrepris la rédaction, selon la même méthode,44 de principes européens dans le même domaine, afin de favoriser la réalisation des objectifs économiques de l’institution communautaire. Certains membres ont d’ailleurs participé aux deux groupes de travail parallèlement. Le produit des travaux des deux commissions a été publié à la même époque. Les Principes relatifs aux contrats du commerce international ont été adoptés et publiés par UNIDROIT en 1994, et les Principes du droit européen du contrat l’ont été en 1995, succédés par des éditions complétives dans les années qui ont suivi. Les deux ouvrages se rapprochent non seulement par leur parenté commune avec les restatements, mais aussi parce qu’ils ont des prétentions similaires. Ils n’aspirent pas à devenir des instruments contraignants. UNIDROIT a refusé de présenter ses principes contractuels à la ratification des Etats qui la mandatent. Quant à la commission Lando, elle a pris ses distances avec le mouvement qui était alors en cours, en faveur d’un code civil européen, se bornant, dans le préambule de ses principes, à évoquer le fait qu’ils pourraient constituer une étape vers un éventuel code européen des contrats.45 Les buts principaux que les deux commissions ont assignés à leur travail sont très éloignés de l’idée de code au sens moderne: servir de lois aux parties qui s’y réfèrent, y compris en droit interne, de norme de référence aux arbitres internationaux, aider le juge à compléter et à interpréter le droit international et le droit national, et fournir aux législateurs nationaux comme internationaux une source d’inspiration. Dans aucune de ces prétentions le droit ainsi produit ne se présente comme ayant vocation à avoir en lui-même une quelconque autorité politique ou publique. Son seul crédit est celui de la science, sa seule arme, celle de la pertinence et de la persuasion. C’est un droit qui ne s’impose que par l’autorité de la raison. Dans l’ensemble, l’accueil des Principes Unidroit a été favorable. La communauté scientifique les étudie avec beaucoup d’intérêt. La pratique hésite encore à les introduire dans les contrats du fait de leur absence de 43 Voir Michael J Bonell, An International Restatement of Contract Law: The Unidroit Principles of International Commercial Contracts, Irvington (NY), Transnational Juris, 1994; Bénédicte Fauvarque-Cosson, « Les contrats du commerce international, une approche nouvelle: Les principes d’Unidroit relatifs aux contrats du commerce international » (1998) 50:2 RIDC 463. 44 La filiation des Principes du droit européen du contrat (PDEC) avec les restatements américains est évidente par la structure d’exposé. Elle est expressément revendiquée (Principes du droit européen du contrat, vol 2, version française préparée par Georges Rouhette et al, Paris, Société de législation comparée, 2003 à la p 25). 45 Ibid. aux pp 22 et s.

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caractère contraignant et de leur statut inédit, mais les arbitres internationaux n’hésitent pas à en faire application lorsque les conditions en sont réunies. Des pays les ont intégrés dans leur législation, notamment la Chine,46 et des cours suprêmes dans leur jurisprudence. Le succès des principes du droit européen du contrat est encore plus évident. Ils ont été utilisés comme référence par plusieurs réformes législatives du droit des obligations en Europe et à l’extérieur de l’Europe.47 Ils ont été intégrés dans le Cadre commun de référence dont il va être question plus loin, à partir duquel l’Union européenne construit aujourd’hui son droit commun des contrats. Une expérience analogue est en cours en Asie avec les Principles of Asian conract law. Ce retour inattendu de l’autorité de la raison et de la culture doctrinale n’est pas accidentel. C’est une tendance forte qui s’annonce, comme le prophétisait David, car elle s’exerce dans un espace rebelle à la puissance du prince et à l’hétéronomie, la communauté mondiale. Elle a donc toutes les chances de se développer et de s’épanouir. Démentant l’interprétation de ses principes comme une simple codification de la lex mercatoria, UNIDROIT a entrepris en 2006, avec l’aide de l’American Law Institute, représentant de la doctrine américaine, un restatement mondial de procédure.48 Les principes mondiaux de procédure civile qui y ont été recueillis ne sont pas des normes à l’usage spécifique des usagers de l’arbitrage international. Comme ceux qui les ont précédés, ils ont vocation à être utilisés dans les litiges internes et à inspirer les législateurs dans les réformes. Quant aux principes Lando, ils ont fait école. Une multitude de commissions, rappelant le mouvement médiéval des universités, a essaimé en Europe pour rédiger selon la méthode comparative des corps de droit européen, soit dans l’ensemble du droit privé, soit dans des secteurs spécifiques.49 Certains de ces travaux ont été utilisés dans des réformes législatives. L’Europe est un cadre intéressant, car on y voit s’exercer de manière précise la tension opposant inévitablement cette logique post-étatique à la désuète logique moderne du droit, le droit autoritatif au droit autoritaire. Les institutions européennes ont, dès la fin des années 1980, avant les premières manifestations du retour du droit autoritatif, lancé à plusieurs reprises l’idée d’un Code civil européen, c’est-à-dire le projet de reproduire à l’échelle européenne l’expérience des codes modernes qui avaient jadis transformé le droit savant en loi. Il est remarquable d’observer que cette idée n’a pas abouti. Devant l’hostilité suscitée par la perspective d’un droit européen contraignant, la Commission européenne a, rebroussant chemin, fait application – consciemment? – des méthodes de la doctrine américaine, celles d’une codification douce débouchant, non pas sur des normes contraignantes, mais sur un cadre de discussion, une grammaire commune aidant dans la recherche des solutions, idée qui avait déjà été à la base du projet Lando.50 D’où le principe d’un cadre commun de référence, réplique européenne du « framework for a continuing dialogue among divergent visions of the law »51 des restatements, cadre qui constituerait un « instrument optionnel », c’est-à-dire, en clair, un texte non contraignant, et servirait de langage de référence dans la législation européenne. En application de ces orientations, la Commission européenne a appelé à la création d’un réseau d’excellence fédérant les groupes universitaires ayant œuvré, dans le cadre du mouvement sus-décrit, à l’édification d’un droit privé européen. Plusieurs de ces groupes se sont unis dans une équipe de compilation et de rédaction qui a produit, 46 Zhang Shaohui, « L’influence des Principes d’UNIDROIT sur la réforme du droit chinois des obligations » (2008) 13 Rev DU 153. 47 A propos de leur influence sur le législateur japonais, comparer Céline Castets-Renard et Hiroki Hatano, « L’influence des PDEC sur les projets de réforme des droits français et japonais des contrats » (2010) 62 RIDC 713. 48 American Law Institute/UNIDROIT, Principles of Transnational Civil Procedure, New York, Cambridge University Press, 2006. Voir R Sturner, « Règles transnationales de procédure civile? Quelques remarques d’un Européen sur un nouveau projet commun de l’American Law Institute et d’Unidroit » (2000) 52:4 RIDC 845; Philippe Fouchard, Vers un procès civil universel? Les règles transnationales de procédure civile de l’American Law Institute, Paris, Panthéon-Assas, 2001. 49 Voir entre autres Reinhard Zimmermann, « Le droit comparé et l’européanisation du droit privé » [2007] RTD civ 451; Bénédicte Fauvarque-Cosson, « Le rôle de la doctrine en droit privé européen » dans Liber Americorum: Etudes offertes à Geneviève Viney, Paris, LGDJ, 2008, 419; Claude Witz, « Traditions savantes et projets de codifications européennes » dans Claude Ophèle et Philippe Rémy, dir, Traditions savantes et codifications. ARISTEC: Colloque Poitiers 8, 9, 10 septembre 2005, Paris, LGDJ, 2007, 273. 50 Il s’agissait de créer un langage commun (a common terminology) et des principes communs (a backbone) auxquels on pouvait se référer pour créer et interpréter le droit unifié: voir Ole Lando, « European Contract Law » (1983) 31:4 Am J Comp L 653 aux pp 654–5; Ole Lando, « Principles of Contract Law, an Alternative to or a Precursor of European Legislation? » (1992) 40:3 Am J Comp L 573 à la p 576. 51 Richard Hyland, supra note 41.

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à partir de leurs travaux antérieurs et des Principes du droit européen du contrat, un projet de cadre commun de référence.52 La version définitive de ce projet a été publiée en 2009.53 Comme les Principes européens du contrat, qui y ont été intégrés, elle adopte la forme des restatements, établissant des principes, assortis de commentaires et de notes de droit comparé. C’est cette forme même qui permet d’obtenir l’effet dialogique caractéristique des restatements, l’effet dit d’un cadre commun de référence. Ce droit autoritatif peut difficilement être digéré par des institutions d’essence étatique et donc servir de technique d’harmonisation,54 mais l’Etat contemporain a appris à émettre un droit non autoritaire, autre signe de sa crise.55 Cette orientation rend possible la reconnaissance par lui d’un droit autoritatif qui lui est étranger. Après s’être assurée une dernière fois que l’opinion publique ne voulait pas d’un code, l’Union européenne a décidé de promulguer une version allégée du cadre commun de référence, réduite au contrat de vente, sous la forme d’un règlement, pour l’heure, à l’état de projet.56 Cette initiative, si elle aboutit, fera entrer l’ouvrage doctrinal dans l’ordre juridique de l’Union européenne et permettra son interprétation par sa Cour de justice; elle lèvera les doutes sur la possibilité de lui donner valeur positive par un contrat. L’abandon de la logique étatique au profit de celle du droit autoritatif ne peut se faire, l’expérience de l’UCC américain l’a montré, sans transition. Mais cette approche compromissoire est riche d’avenir. Elle a été adoptée aussi en 2011 en vue de la création d’un droit européen du droit d’auteur.57 La Commission européenne envisage de la mettre également en œuvre pour l’adoption d’un régime matrimonial européen58 et encore dans d’autres domaines. Les spécialistes se demandent s’il n’y a pas là un virage dans la méthode d’harmonisation du droit en Europe. Le système des directives a montré ses limites, à savoir la fragmentation du droit et un effet limité du fait de la possibilité reconnue au Etats-membres d’individualiser les règles. Le droit commun européen de la vente pourrait donc être le point de départ d’une nouvelle approche des méthodes d’intégration et servir de modèle aux initiatives normatives subséquentes.59 C’est dire l’importance de la portée de l’évènement.

52 Voir Vincent Sagaert, Matthias E Storme et Evelyne Terryn, dir, The Draft Common Frame of Reference: National and Comparative Perspectives, Cambridge (R-U), Intersentia, 2012. 53 Study Group on a European Civil Code/Research Group on EC Private Law (Acquis Group), Principles, Definitions and Model Rules of European Private Law: Draft Common Frame of Reference (DCFR), vol 1–6, Munich, Sellier, 2009. L’ouvrage porte sur les contrats, les obligations, la propriété mobilière, les sûretés réelles mobilières et le trust. Une version résumée a été publiée par le même éditeur, la même année. La Société de législation comparée et l’Association Henri Capitant ont également rédigé un projet de cadre commun de référence en deux volumes (vol 6: Terminologie contractuelle commune; vol 7: Principes contractuels communs, Paris, Société de législation comparée, coll Droit privé comparé et européen, 2008). 54 Peter-Christian Müller-Graff, « Private Law Unification by Means Other than of Codification » in Arthur S Hartkamp et al, dir, Towards a European Civil Code, 4e éd, Nijmegen, La Haye, Boston; Ars Aequi Libri, Kluwer, 2011, 149. 55 Voir entre autres Association Henri Capitant, Le droit souple, t 13, Paris, Dalloz, 2009, incluant une contribution sur les codifications savantes en général (G Chantepie, « Les codifications privées », 39). 56 CE, Proposition de règlement du Parlement européen et du Conseil relatif à un droit commun européen de la vente, [2011] SEC(2011) 1165 final, SEC(2011) 1166 final. Sur laquelle, voir Olivier Deshayes, dir, Le droit commun européen de la vente: Examen de la proposition de règlement du 11 octobre 2011, Paris, Société de législation comparée, coll Trans Europe Experts, 2012; Reiner Schulze, dir, Common European Sales Law (CESL): Commentary, Oxford, Hart, 2012. 57 CE, Communication de la Commission au Parlement européen, au Conseil, au Comité économique et social européen et au Comité des régions: Vers un marché unique des droits de propriété intellectuelle: Doper la créativité pour permettre à l’Europe de créer de la croissance économique, des emplois de qualité et des produits et services de premier choix, Bruxelles, CE, 2011. Voir Céline Castets-Renard, « La réforme du droit d’auteur en Europe, vers un code européen? » [2012] 15 Recueil Dalloz 955; Alexandra Bensamoun et Célia Zolynski, « La promotion du droit négocié en propriété intellectuelle: consécration d’une conception dialogique du droit » [2011] 26 Recueil Dalloz 1773. 58 Voir Katharina Boele-Woelki, « Cross-border Family Relations in Europe: Towards a Common European Matrimonial Property Law Based upon Cooperation between Private International Law and Substantive Law » dans Anne LM Keirse et Marco BM Loos, dir, Alternative Ways to Ius Commune: The Europeanisation of Private Law, Cambridge (R-U), Intersentia, 2012, 33. 59 Esther van Schagen, « The Proposal for a Common European Sales Law: How Its Drafting Process Might Affect the Optional Instrument’s Added Value for Contract Parties and Its Success » dans Anne LM Keirse et Marco BM Loos, dir, Alternative Ways to Ius commune: The Europeanisation of Private Law, Cambridge (R-U), Intersentia, 2012, 85.

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V. Conclusion Si les codifications savantes qui se développent depuis une vingtaine d’années constituent un mouvement profond dans l’ordre des sources du droit, alors, Duck avait vu juste en soutenant que le jus commune n’est que du droit autoritatif, nullement du droit étatique. Certes, le droit commun s’est transformé en droit étatique à partir du XVIIIe siècle, lui apportant un démenti, mais cela n’aura été qu’un évènement temporaire qui n’a pas pu empêcher le droit commun de poursuivre son chemin et de retrouver, ce qu’il est en train de faire aujourd’hui, sa forme naturelle et initiale, celle de la science. Cela n’aura été qu’un incident de parcours du destin de la science du droit, car, le moment le plus important de la partie va se jouer maintenant. Apres avoir révélé le droit divin à la chrétienté et le droit naturel à la modernité, la science va pouvoir, à présent, exécuter la phase ultime de sa tâche, révéler aux communautés humaines rassemblant les Etats et à l’humanité dans son ensemble leur droit commun, ou, du moins, y contribuer notablement. L’Etat n’est pas à même, par ses seules forces, d’atteindre cet objectif, parce que le droit qu’il produit, même avec la méthode du droit commun, n’est jamais qu’un droit international, non pas un droit commun, et parce que la société mondiale sera une société sans Etat. La science du droit a les qualités requises pour accomplir cette mission. Issue des religions révélées, sa raison d’être est de découvrir une transcendance auxquels les hommes ne peuvent pas accéder de plain-pied. Cette fonction n’avait plus de sens dans un droit que la modernité a sécularisé et étatisé, ce qui explique le lent dépérissement de la science du droit depuis les codifications. Mais l’incapacité dans laquelle se trouve l’Etat de révéler un droit supérieur et la nécessité d’aller à nouveau à la recherche du droit commun, son droit, remet à l’ordre du jour son office. Il ne s’agit plus de révéler la raison du droit divin ni la raison naturelle, notions auxquelles une partie importante de la communauté mondiale ne souscrit plus. La science du droit a encore son mot à dire parce qu’il s’agit de dégager la rationalité commune des lois positives, ce qui est sa raison d’être. Le droit commun mondial ou régional est imperceptible pour l’instant. Il demeure donc dans l’ordre de la métaphysique, matière dont l’élucidation a toujours engendré le besoin d’une science herméneutique. C’est en cela que la science du droit apparait objectivement comme une alternative à l’Etat dans la production du droit. Comme elle l’a toujours fait, elle révèlera le droit commun par l’interprétation des lois nourrie de leur enseignement et l’utilisation de la méthode comparative afin de démêler les principes généraux des simples normes contingentes, la confrontation des lois faisant jaillir leur hiérarchie objective. Ce qui change désormais, c’est que la comparaison porte sur des droits étatiques, d’où il suit que la vocation que s’est assignée la doctrine d’interpréter le droit interne d’un Etat depuis la codification deviendra, à terme, caduque. Le savant de demain sera un comparatiste, au sens qu’a pris ce mot depuis la naissance du droit comparé, celui de la confrontation des droits des Etats. Ce nouvel enjeu accélèrera le dépérissement de la science interne du droit, déjà largement accompli.

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Part IV The Practice, Teaching and Learning of Stateless Law

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Chapter 13

Thinking, Doing, Being: Why ‘Practising’ Law Matters to the Prevention of Torture

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Stephen J. Toope

The creation of something new is not accomplished by the intellect but by the play instinct acting from inner necessity. The creative mind plays with the objects it loves. Carl Jung1 We have to conclude, therefore, that civilization is, in its earliest phases, played. It does not come from play like a baby detaching itself from the womb: it arises in and as play, and never leaves it. Johan Huizinga2

I. Introduction In the immediate aftermath of the terrible attacks of 11 September 2001, a group of bright, well-educated US government legal advisors articulated justifications for the use of ‘aggressive’ interrogation techniques by US security agents that amounted to torture. As we contemplate the present and future of legal education, it is important to ask ourselves why these legal advisors adopted the positions they argued, and how they used their legal skills to justify them. Answering those questions requires us to assess both the dominant contemporary understanding of law in Western society and the attendant understanding of what constitutes a ‘good’ legal education. Sadly, we should not be surprised that a collection of some of ‘the best and the brightest’ lawyers of their generation should have found a means to justify torture by a state committed to ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’. Prevailing statist and positivist understandings of law have allowed instrumentalism to triumph over moral judgment and ethical responsibility. Legal education has not done enough to help lawyers develop the sophisticated interpretative tools and self-reflective instincts necessary to practice in a world that is complex and non-binary. Nor has it been sufficiently infused with transdisciplinary insight to allow for the creative intellectual ‘play’ – in a rich and serious sense of that verb – that develops resistance to superficial answers and narrowly instrumental approaches to complex problems. Although the specific cultural and political roots of the ‘McGill programme’ of transsystemic legal education mean that it cannot and should not be replicated globally, the insights that drove the creation of the programme and the lessons that can be derived from its early implementation could help to address some significant flaws of much of contemporary Western law and legal education. The McGill programme is an important expression of a vision of law and legal education recognizing the social, interactional and practice-derived grounding of legal normativity. It opens students to an understanding of law in which the various traditions of legality (an inclusive ‘rule of law’) transcend particular state political constructs. And it encourages a reflexivity and interpretative sophistication that require of students and lawyers legal analysis that is internally ethical. 1 CG Jung, Psychological Types (in The Collected Works of CG Jung, vol 6), revised by RFC Hull from the translation by HG Baynes (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977) at 123. For further discussion later in this chapter, see text accompanying note 53. 2 Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1949) at 173. For further discussion later in this chapter, see text accompanying note 52.

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The claims I make are admittedly bold, and for the purposes of a relatively short chapter much of my argument must be telegraphic in style. In Section II, I briefly review attempts by lawyers in the Bush Administration to undermine the anti-torture norms of international and American law. Section III is a description of ways of thinking about law and legal education that have the capacity to enliven the study of law and elicit the intellectual ‘play’ in practice. In Section IV, I show that the perception that North American legal education is deficient, or even ‘in crisis’, seems to be perennial, and review suggestions for ‘reform’ dating back to the beginning of the last century. Finally, Section V draws together an expansive understanding of ‘practice’ and opportunities for the reform of legal education. We can and must address longstanding deficiencies of legal education, deficiencies that help to explain some US government lawyers’ attempts to justify torture. I conclude with a call for the personal and professional responsibility of lawyers that is essential to any strong conception of a rule of law in international society. II. Attacking the Anti-Torture Norm3 In an important legal decision flowing from the attacks of 11 September 2001, President Bush issued an Executive Order in February of the following year denying Taliban and Al Qaeda prisoners the protections of the Geneva Conventions.4 In issuing the Order, he argued that the United States needed ‘new thinking in the law of war’.5 The Bush Administration determined that ‘terrorists and other enemy fighters who did not wear uniforms or carry their arms openly’ would not be treated as prisoners of war. As a direct consequence of that decision, the Administration asked its legal counsel to provide new guidance on what sort of ‘techniques’ could be employed to get accused Al Qaeda operatives in custody to talk. In July 2002, National Security Advisor Rice and CIA Director Tenet agreed that the CIA should go ahead with interrogations of top Al Qaeda suspect Abu Zubayda, once the Department of Justice signed off.6 At the beginning of August 2002, the head of the Office of the Legal Counsel (OLC) in the Department of Justice, Jay Bybee, sent a memo to the Counsel to the CIA, opining that 10 specific techniques, escalating in force up to waterboarding, did not constitute torture.7 On the same day, a second memo from the OLC, also signed by Bybee, but written primarily by John Yoo, was sent to the White House Counsel, Alberto Gonzales.8 In implementing the UN Convention Against Torture,9 the US Congress had already defined torture narrowly, limiting ‘torture’ which might give rise to criminal prosecution within the US to acts ‘specifically intended’ to

3 Much of the detail in this Section is derived from Jutta Brunnée & Stephen J Toope, Legitimacy and Legality in International Law: An Interactional Account (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2010) ch 5 [Brunnée & Toope, Legitimacy and Legality]. 4 US White House, Memorandum, “Humane Treatment of al Qaeda and Taliban Detainees” (7 February 2002) at 1, online: National Security Archive – George Washington University [White House Memorandum]. For a description of the internal administration process that resulted in this decision by the President, see Philippe Sands, Torture Team (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008) at 30–36. 5 White House Memorandum, supra note 4 at 1. 6 US Senator John D Rockefeller IV, “Release of Declassified Narrative Describing the Department of Justice Office of Legal Counsel’s Opinions on the CIA’s Detention and Interrogation Program” (22 April 2009) at 2–4, online: US Senate Select Committee on Intelligence . 7 US Assistant Attorney General Jay S Bybee, “Memorandum for John Rizzo, Acting General Counsel of the Central Intelligence Agency Re: Interrogation of al Qaeda Operative” (1 August 2002) at 2, 18, online: US Department of Justice, Office of Legal Counsel ; see also Scott Shane, David Johnston & James Risen, “Secret US endorsement of severe interrogations”, The New York Times (4 October 2007), online: NYT . 8 US Assistant Attorney General Jay S Bybee, “Memorandum for Alberto R Gonzales, Counsel to the President Re: Standards of Conduct for Interrogation under 18 USC §§2340–2340A” (1 August 2002), online: US Department of Justice, Office of Legal Counsel [First Yoo Memo]. On the real authorship of the memo, see Jack Goldsmith, Terror Presidency: Law and Judgment inside the Bush Administration (New York: WW Norton, 2007) at 142. 9 United Nations Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, 26 June 1984, 1465 UNTS 85, Can TS 1987/36, art 1(1) (entered into force 26 June 1987, Reg No 24841).

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cause ‘severe physical … pain’10 or ‘prolonged mental harm’.11 Yoo sought to limit the concept of torture even further, interpreting the US statute so that only pain ‘associated with a sufficiently serious physical condition or injury such as death, organ failure, or serious impairment of bodily functions’ constitutes physical torture.12 The legal analysis that Professor Yoo13 employed to reach this conclusion has been harshly criticized.14 Starting from the debatable proposition that the statutory requirement that acts causing ‘severe … pain’ or ‘prolonged mental harm’ is inherently ambiguous, Yoo (and Bybee) looked for analogous definitions of ‘severe pain’ in other US statutes. They chose as the principal analogy a definition of ‘emergency medical condition’ entitling someone to obtain health care benefits.15 In his powerful critique of this approach, Bradley Wendel asks the right question: ‘Is it a legitimate legal argument to infer the definition of severe pain from the emergency health care benefits statute to the torture statute?’16 After a careful reading and a logical parsing of the statutes, his conclusion and mine is ‘no’. In Wendel’s words, ‘[t]he lawyers’ argument feels like someone went fishing around on a computer database looking to match up the search terms without using their judgment to decide whether the match was on point’.17 This description may be too generous, for with lawyers as well-trained as Yoo, it is hard to believe that he did not use his judgment. Conscious manipulation seems more likely. Apparently, Professor Yoo was referred to as ‘Dr Yes’ by Attorney-General Ashcroft, for Yoo’s inclination to give the White House whatever it needed as legal cover for its anti-terrorism policies.18 Even a high-ranking Administration official who continued to defend the arc of the Bush anti-terrorism strategy after leaving office concluded that this OLC memo improperly suggested that ‘the President could disregard legal prohibitions on torture’.19 During the month of August, Zubayda was subjected to waterboarding more than 80 times.20 Lest one be lulled into a false complacency by Vice-President Cheney’s assertion that waterboarding is a ‘dunk in the water’,21 consider this description of waterboarding provided by a person who trained US personnel in its application: Waterboarding is a controlled drowning that, in the American model, occurs under the watch of a doctor, a psychologist, an interrogator, and a trained strap-in/strap-out team. It does not simulate drowning, as the lungs are actually filling with water. There is no way to simulate that. … How much the victim is to drown depends upon the desired result … and the obstinacy of the subject. … When done right it is controlled death. Its lack of physical scarring allows the victim to recover and be threaten[ed] with its use again and again.22 10 18 USC § 2340(1) (1994). 11 Ibid. 12 First Yoo Memo, supra note 8 at 6. See also ibid. at 46; Goldsmith, supra note 8 at 145. 13 Professor Yoo teaches at the Berkeley Law School. 14 See e.g. W Bradley Wendel, “The Torture Memos and the Demands of Legality” (2009) 12 Legal Ethics 107 [Wendel, “The Torture Memos”]; Goldsmith, supra note 8 at ch 5; David Luban, Legal Ethics and Human Dignity (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2007) ch 5, “The Torture Lawyers of Washington”. 15 42 USC § 1395w–22(d)(3)(B). 16 W Bradley Wendel, “Should Law Schools Teach Professional Duties, Professional Virtues, or Something Else? A Critique of the Carnegie Report on Educating Lawyers” (2011) 9 University of St Thomas Law Journal 497 at 536 [Wendel, “Should Law Schools Teach”]. 17 Ibid. at 537. 18 Shane, Johnston & Risen, supra note 7. 19 Goldsmith, supra note 8 at 135. 20 US Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General Steven G Bradbury, “Memorandum for John A Rizzo, Senior Deputy General Counsel, Central Intelligence Agency Re: Application of United States Obligations Under Article 16 of the Convention Against Torture to Certain Techniques that May Be Used in the Interrogation of High Value al Qaeda Detainees” (30 May 2005) at 37, online: US Department of Justice, Office of Legal Counsel [Bradbury Memo]; see also Scott Shane, “Waterboarding used 266 times on 2 suspects”, The New York Times (19 April 2009), online: NYT . 21 W Bradley Wendel, “Executive Branch Lawyers in a Time of Terror: The 2008 FW Wickwire Memorial Lecture” (2008) 31 Dal LJ 247 at 249. 22 Malcolm W Nance, “Waterboarding is torture … period” (31 October 2007), Small Wars Journal – SWJ Blog, online: SWJ , reprinted as “Attachment A to Prepared Statement of Malcolm W Nance in US” in Torture and the Cruel, Inhuman and Degrading Treatment of

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It was the repeated use of waterboarding on the most important Al Qaeda suspects that the OLC sought to justify. From 25–26 September 2002, senior Administration legal officials, including future Attorney General, Alberto Gonzales, visited the US prison at Guantánamo Bay. A few weeks later the Guantánamo commander requested the authorization of new interrogation techniques, supported by a legal memorandum authored by an inexperienced and worried Staff Judge Advocate, Diane Beaver, who had tried without success to have her legal opinion checked and corrected by superiors.23 In December 2002, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld authorized aggressive interrogation techniques for prisoners at Guantánamo Bay, relying on the legal opinion authored by Diane Beaver. That opinion was simply attached to the authorization signed by Rumsfeld who in turn relied on the covering memo authored by his General Counsel, William J. Haynes II.24 In other words, senior Counsel avoided any direct responsibility by simply ‘transmitting’ the legal opinion of a lawyer with almost no knowledge or experience in the area that she was asked to address. In March 2003 US and Pakistani forces captured the main planner of the 11 September attacks, Kalid Sheikh Mohammed, and sent him to Guantánamo where he was then waterboarded 183 times that month alone.25 That same March, John Yoo sent another memo, this time to the Counsel to the Department of Defense, detailing the international and domestic law applicable to the treatment of detainees. He argued that ‘national self-defense’ and executive power are paramount considerations, trumping all legal constraints.26 The thrust of the legal advice being offered to US interrogators was that aggressive techniques were necessary in the War on Terror, and that ‘torture’ could be read so narrowly as to allow techniques that might otherwise be contrary to international and US law. In other words, by fiat of redefinition in the name of national security, no ‘torture’ was being committed. The existence of the ‘torture memos’ was revealed in June by the Washington Post,27 and the new head of the OLC, Jack Goldsmith, withdrew the August 2002 memo and subsequently resigned.28 In December 2004, the acting head of the OLC, Daniel Levin, publicly issued a new memo stating that torture is illegal and ‘abhorrent’.29 However, through another line of contorted reasoning Levin managed, like Yoo, to conclude that waterboarding is not torture.30 In February 2005, Alberto Gonzales became the eightieth Attorney General of the United States, and in May, Steven G. Bradbury of the OLC sent a new and more comprehensive memo to the CIA Counsel, supplanting the Levin memo.31 This secret memo provided explicit authority to subject detainees to ‘a combination of painful physical and psychological tactics, including head-slapping, simulated drowning and Detainees: The Effectiveness and Consequences of “Enhanced” Interrogation: Hearing before the Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights, and Civil Liberties of the Committee on the Judiciary, House of Representatives, November 8, 2007, 110th Cong (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 2008) 25 at 26, online: US Government Printing Office . 23 Sands, supra note 4 at 63–5. 24 William J Haynes II, General Counsel of the Department of Defense, “Action Memo to the Secretary of Defense Re: Counter-Resistance Techniques” (27 November 2002) at 1, online: National Security Archive – George Washington University . For a full description of the process of authorization, see Sands, supra note 4 at chs 1–8. 25 See Shane, supra note 20. 26 US Deputy Assistant Attorney General John C Yoo, “Memorandum for William J Haynes II, General Counsel of the Department of Defense Re: Military Interrogation of Alien Unlawful Combatants Held outside the United States” (14 March 2003) at 80–81, online: Homeland Security Digital Library . 27 Dana Priest & R Jeffrey Smith, “Memo offered justification for use of torture: Justice Dept gave advice in 2002”, The Washington Post (8 June 2004), online: WP . 28 Jeffrey Rosen, “Conscience of a conservative”, The New York Times (9 September 2007), online: NYT . See also Goldsmith, supra note 8 at 161–2. 29 US Acting Assistant Attorney General Daniel Levin, “Memorandum Opinion for the Deputy Attorney General Re: Legal Standards Applicable under 18 USC §§ 2340–2340A” (30 December 2004), online: US Department of Justice, Office of Legal Counsel . 30 See Scott Shane & David Johnston, “US Lawyers agreed on legality of brutal tactic”, The New York Times (6 June 2009), online: NYT . 31 Bradbury Memo, supra note 20 at 47.

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frigid temperatures’.32 The memo was issued over the strong objections of the Deputy Attorney-General, James Comey, who was in the process of leaving the Department of Justice because of clashes with the White House. Mr Comey warned that the OLC would be ‘ashamed’ when the existence of the secret memo came to light.33 Professor Yoo remains completely sanguine about his role in authorizing torture, suggesting that people who question his analysis are stooges of terrorists.34 He suggests that he never doubted that there was a ban on torture, only that the term needed more precise definition. ‘But’, he asks, ‘would limiting a captured terrorist to six hours’ sleep, isolating him, interrogating him for several hours, or requiring him to exercise constitute’ suffering amounting to torture?35 Phrased in this anodyne manner, the answer might be ‘no’.36 But what if one were closer to the actual practices used on some ‘high value’ detainees at Guantánamo Bay and elsewhere? What if the isolation went on for months; if the deprivation of sleep were repeated for days on end? What if the interrogations included threats of rape, slaps, the use of pornography, and subjection to extremely loud music for hours at a time? What if, interspersed amongst the questions, was repeated waterboarding? How lawyers describe and analyse is central to our roles in the world, and I will argue that legal analysis incorporates internal ethical standards. The ethics of being a lawyer are not add-ons to practice itself. III. Law as Intellectual ‘Play’ through Practice Over the last 15 years or so, Jutta Brunnée and I have traced out an understanding of international law that focuses upon social interactions that create, maintain or destroy legal obligation.37 The work is grounded in insights from legal theory that are derived primarily from the consideration of domestic law, so our understandings of how law works are general, and not specific to international law. More recently, our work has connected with a wider ‘practice turn’ in theorizing about international politics and law.38 Building specifically on Emanuel Adler’s work on ‘communities of practice’,39 we suggest that understanding the obligatory effect of international law requires an explicit focus on the practices that sustain legality.40

32 Shane, Johnston & Risen, supra note 7. 33 Ibid. See also Goldsmith, supra note 8 at 159–60. 34 John Yoo, “Terror suspects are waging ‘lawfare’ on US”, The Philadelphia Inquirer (16 January 2008), online: Philly.com . 35 John Yoo, War by Other Means: An Insider’s Account of the War on Terror (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2006) at 171–2. 36 But see Jessica Wolfendale, “The Myth of ‘Torture Lite’” (2009) 23 Ethics and International Affairs 47 at 47, 50, 52–4. ‘“[D]espite the frequency with which the term is used, the distinction between torture and torture lite [e.g. loud music, sleep deprivation] is not one that is recognized in any of the international conventions dealing with torture”, but it’s embraced by democratic regimes as a partial mitigation of the use of “torture” broadly’ (Brunnée & Toope, Legitimacy and Legality, supra note 3 at 254, n 189, citing Wolfendale, supra note 36 at 47). 37 Jutta Brunnée & Stephen J Toope, “International Law and Constructivism: Elements of an Interactional Theory of International Law” (2000) 39 Colum J Transnat’l L 19 [Brunnée & Toope, “International Law and Constructivism”]; Jutta Brunnée & Stephen J Toope, “Persuasion and Enforcement: Explaining Compliance with International Law” (2002) 13 Finnish Yearbook of International Law 273 [Brunnée & Toope‚ “Persuasion and Enforcement”]; Brunnée & Toope, Legitimacy and Legality, supra note 3. Our initial work was informed by debates around curriculum reform at McGill, and in particular by the insights of Professor Rod Macdonald. See e.g. Roderick A Macdonald, “Office Politics” (1990) 40 UTLJ 419; Roderick A Macdonald, “Metaphors of Multiplicity: Civil Society, Regimes and Legal Pluralism” (1998) 15 Ariz J Int’l & Comp L 69; Roderick A Macdonald & Jason MacLean, “No Toilets in Park” (2005) 50 McGill LJ 721. 38 Jutta Brunnée & Stephen J Toope, “Interactional International Law and the Practice of Legality” in Emanuel Adler & Vincent Pouliot, eds, International Practices (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2011) 108. Much of this section is derived from this recent work. 39 Emanuel Adler, “Security Communities: Communities of Practice, Self-Restraint, and NATO’s Post Cold War Transformation” (2008) 14 European Journal of International Relations 195; Emanuel Adler & Steven Bernstein, “Knowledge in Power: The Epistemic Construction of Global Governance” in Michael Barnett & Raymond Duvall, eds, Power in Global Governance (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2005) 294. 40 Brunnée & Toope, Legitimacy and Legality, supra note 3.

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A comprehensive understanding of legal obligation emerges when our focus is shifted from the formal manifestations of law to the interplay between internal markers of legality and the practices that sustain legality. Drawing together insights from constructivist approaches to IR and the legal theory of Lon Fuller, Brunnée and I have developed a comprehensive theory of international legal obligation.41 Constructivism helps us illuminate how norms emerge and shape social interaction.42 Based on a set of criteria of legality identified by Fuller,43 we argue that legal norms exert a distinctive influence. However, even when those criteria are largely met, obligation is only created and sustained through the internal practices of law and lawyers, what we call a ‘practice of legality’.44 Insights from Fuller have long been employed to explain the social grounding of law creation and interpretation within domestic law as well.45 Interactional theory presents a pragmatic view of how law, including international law, is made, maintained or destroyed. We adopt what Kratochwil calls the ‘generative grammar’ of American pragmatism, of which Lon Fuller was the central proponent in legal theory.46 This complex pragmatism has deep roots in classical theory, and especially in the ‘practical reasoning’ or ‘practical wisdom’ of Aristotle.47 For Aristotle and for Fuller, law is purposive, not abstract; it is inherently connected to argument.48 H. Patrick Glenn adopts a similar position in describing legal traditions as information and argument, extended over time.49 Pragmatism in this complex form casts doubt on the possibility of the Cartesian search for ‘truth’, substituting what Mootz calls ‘the rhetorical elucidation of prudent action under conditions of uncertainty’.50 In attempting to re-establish a contemporary role for early eighteenth-century thinker, Giambattista Vico, Mootz argues: Many of life’s issues simply are not amenable to philosophical analysis in the Cartesian tradition; instead, they call for mature judgment that Vico identifies with the ancient rhetorical tradition. The ingenuity of finding similarities among seemingly different factors, the imaginative capacity to create a new understanding of reality, and the prudence to choose appropriately when the matter is not subject to calculation: these are the humanistic capabilities that Vico championed despite the vigorous Cartesian criticism that their uncertain bases introduce the possibility of error. The sage must be committed to the truth, but also ready to act when the frailties of the human condition preclude an analysis that demonstrates the truth of the matter.51

41 Brunnée & Toope, “International Law and Constructivism”, supra note 37; Brunnée & Toope, “Persuasion and Enforcement”, supra note 37. 42 See Martha Finnemore & Kathryn Sikkink, “International Norm Dynamics and Political Change” (1998) 52 International Organization 887; John Gerard Ruggie, “What Makes the World Hang Together? Neo-utilitarianism and the Social Constructivist Challenge” (1998) 52 International Organization 855; Alexander Wendt, Social Theory of International Politics (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1999); Antje Wiener, Invisible Constitution of Politics: Contested Norms and International Encounters (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2008). 43 Lon L Fuller, The Morality of Law, revised ed (New Haven, Conn: Yale University Press, 1969) ch 2. 44 For a detailed review of the concept and how it functions, see Brunnée & Toope, Legitimacy and Legality, supra note 3 at ch 2. 45 See e.g. Willem J Witteveen & Wilbren van der Burg, eds, Rediscovering Fuller: Essays on Implicit Law and Institutional Design (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1999); Macdonald & MacLean, supra note 37 at 725–6, 746, 759. 46 Friedrich Kratochwil, “Making Sense of ‘International Practices’” in Emanuel Adler & Vincent Pouliot, eds, International Practices (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2011) 36. 47 Aristotle, The Ethics of Aristotle: The Nicomachean Ethics, translated by JAK Thomson (London: Penguin Books, 1976) Book X, Section ix, 335ff, especially at 340–41. 48 See Brunnée & Toope, Legitimacy and Legality, supra note 3 at ch 1. See also David Barnhizer, “The Purposes and Methods of American Legal Education” (2011) 36 J Legal Prof 1 at 24. 49 H Patrick Glenn, “Doin’ the Transsystemic: Legal Systems and Legal Traditions” (2005) 50 McGill LJ 863 at 875 [Glenn, “Doin’ the Transsystemic”]; and see generally H Patrick Glenn, Legal Traditions of the World: Sustainable Diversity in Law, 2d ed (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004) [Glenn, Legal Traditions]. Glenn draws a further conclusion that I would not, in suggesting that no law is ever ‘binding’, only persuasive. 50 Francis J Mootz, “Vico’s ‘Ingenious Method’ and Legal Education” (2008) 83 Chicago-Kent L Rev 1261 at 1268 and, on Descartes, at 1279–81, 1298. 51 Ibid. at 1282.

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It is this complex view of ‘practice’ in law that I defend, one that requires imagination and creativity matched with prudence. It connects directly to Huizinga’s argument that play is generative of civilization,52 and Jung’s insight that the creative mind actually ‘plays’ with objects it loves.53 ‘Play through practice’ encapsulates these ideas in the realm of law. It is a commitment to the love of complex intellectual pursuit54 – use of careful analogy, creativity in drawing connections, empathetic judgment, sophistication in the design of complex institutions – while recognizing that law is not a game (or ‘play’) in a trivial sense because of the consequences it entails for real people. Imagination and prudence are balanced because ideas are tested in practice, in the complexities, joys and tragedies of life.55 Lawyers play a ‘bewildering’ number of roles in society,56 and we require principle as well as subtlety, creativity and flexibility. Pragmatic interactional theory unfolds as follows. First, legal norms are recognized as social norms. As such they are connected to social practice – they must be grounded in shared understandings, part of what Adler and Pouliot call ‘background knowledge’.57 Second, what distinguishes law from other types of social ordering is adherence to criteria of legality, which Fuller enumerated as: generality, promulgation, nonretroactivity, clarity, non-contradiction, not asking the impossible, constancy and congruence between rules and official action. They make legal norms possible. When norm creation meets these criteria of legality and, third, is matched with norm application that also satisfies these requirements – when there exists a ‘practice of legality’ – actors will be able to pursue their purposes and organize their interactions through law. These elements are crucial to generating distinctive legal legitimacy and a sense of commitment amongst those to whom law is addressed. They create legal obligation. Note that I do not argue that law is simply ‘whatever lawyers do’.58 What lawyers do is shaped by social understandings and by the criteria of legality, so there are internal constraints on what can ‘count’ as law.59 The intellectual ‘play’ of lawyers in practice is necessary for the existence of law, but is bounded by recognition of consequences in life. Legality is tethered to broader social practices, in part because actors, to understand law’s guidance, must first of all share a basic repertoire of common reference points – ‘implicit rules’ that are embedded in social practice.60 For many legal traditions, the very notion of a ‘rule of law’ is one of those shared understandings.61 It follows that interactional obligation must be practised to maintain its influence.

52 Supra note 2. 53 Supra note 1. 54 Plato argued that the role of all rhetoric, and particularly that of the legal advocate, is to ‘enchan[t] the minds’ of the listeners, including the judge: see Irwin Edman, ed, The Works of Plato (New York: Modern Library, 1928) 292, cited in Barnhizer, supra note 48 at 58. See also Macdonald & MacLean, supra note 37 (‘interpretation is more than practice; it is play. While the constitution of meaning demands considerable energy and seriousness – and can result in significant consequences for the interpreter –, it nonetheless invites us to have fun’ at 725, n 5); Shauna Van Praagh, “Preface: Navigating the Transsystemic: A Course Syllabus” (2005) 50 McGill LJ 701 at 704 (on the intellectual interest in transgressing borders ‘through emphasis on analogy, problem-solving, or recognition of cultural context’ at 704). 55 Wendel, “Should Law Schools Teach”, supra note 16 at 497–8, 523, 528. 56 James R Maxeiner, “Educating Lawyers Now and Then: Two Carnegie Critiques of the Common Law and the Case Method” (2007) 35 Int’l J Legal Info 1 at 27. 57 Emanuel Adler & Vincent Pouliot, “International Practices: Introduction and Framework” in Emanuel Adler & Vincent Pouliot, eds, International Practices (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2011) 3 at 8–35. See also John R Searle, The Construction of Social Reality, (New York: Free Press, 1995), for the concept of social background. A similar concept of ‘commonplace’ underpins the Carnegie Foundation’s review of legal education discussed below. See Judith Welch Wegner, “Reframing Legal Education’s ‘Wicked Problems’” (2009) 61 Rutgers L Rev 867 at 883–4. 58 For a coruscating account of naive forms of ‘pragmatism’ linked to legal realism, see Harold J Berman, “The Crisis of Legal Education in America” (1985) 26 BCL Rev 347. 59 See also Wendel, “Should Law Schools Teach”, supra note 16 at 498–501, 515–17, 519 (including a discussion of HLA Hart’s ‘internal perspective’, which plays a function parallel to Fuller’s criteria of legality, but only for decisionmakers, not for all participants in the legal process). See also Glenn, “Doin’ the Transsystemic”, supra note 49 at 869. 60 Gerald J Postema, “Implicit Law” (1994) 13 Law & Phil 361, reprinted in Witteveen & Van der Burg, supra note 45, 255 at 259, 264; Friedrich V Kratochwil, “How Do Norms Matter?” in Michael Byers, ed, The Role of Law in International Politics: Essays in International Relations and International Law (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000) at 40–41. 61 See Barnhizer, supra note 48 at 25–7.

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The idea of communities of practice completes the relationship between law and shared understandings. One might think of interactional law as a particular type of community of practice, nourished by broader social practices, but distinct from them. Interactional law does not arise simply because a community of practice has grown around a given issue or norm. Only when this community is engaged in a practice of legality rooted in the specific background criteria of legality, can shared legal understandings, be they procedural or substantive, modest or ambitious, be produced, maintained or altered. I suggest that there exist multiple, overlapping such communities of legal practice. What is more, because the very notion of ‘practice’ is active and iterative, communities of practice are fluid and their ‘products’ remain changeable.62 That is why Brunnée and I assert that the hard work of international law, like all law, is never done.63 An important theoretical and practical point follows from understanding interactional law as a community of practice: it is not enough to cast socially shared understandings in legal form; they cannot simply be ‘posited’. Positive law may be an element of interactional law, often an important element, but it is not necessarily coextensive with it. The communities-of-practice concept instructs that positive law is a method of ‘fixing’ legal understandings, or creating ‘short cuts’ to legal substance or procedure – a function that is particularly important in large, diffuse societies. But without sufficiently dense interactions and participation of its members, positive law will remain, or become, dead letter. The interactional account, enriched by the concept of communities of practice, thus enables us to appreciate why, as Postema put it, ‘enacted, pedigreevalidated, authoritative norms (“made law”) represent only the surface phenomena of law’.64 Interactional analysis helps to identify the ways in which the ability of powerful actors to dominate legal relationships can be constrained. Because power is ‘a relation … that is both material and symbolic’,65 power can be constrained through means other than the application of raw material capabilities. Interactional international law reveals that when power is exercised arbitrarily and without the legitimacy generated in part through upholding the criteria of legality, it is likely to be ineffective.66 IV. A ‘Crisis’ in Legal Education In the context of professional education, students must learn to ‘think and know’, ‘do and act’, and ‘believe and be’ while wrapping these dimensions into a meaningful whole. Judith Wegner67

University professors, for all our strengths, tend towards introspection, at least in relation to our academic roles. It is no surprise, therefore, that every so often a coterie of law professors will erupt in a declaration of ‘crisis’ in legal education. Even if the word ‘crisis’ is not employed, the burden of complaint is serious. The tendency is particularly pronounced in the United States of America, with spill-over effects (as usual) in Canada. One can only speculate as to the reasons, as a detailed historical account is beyond the scope of this chapter. But it is at least arguable that North American, and especially US, society is self-consciously changeoriented, giving rise to periodic self-assessments of dangerous stasis that must be addressed. In addition, the methods of legal education have changed dramatically within the last century, with a movement away

62 This conceptualization of law has strong ties to Glenn’s understanding of legal traditions as ‘the changing presence of the past’ (Glenn, Legal Traditions, supra note 49 at 23). See also Mootz, supra note 50 at 1294 (quoting Robert Scott on the malleability of traditions). 63 Jutta Brunnée & Stephen J Toope, “History, Mystery, and Mastery” (2011) 3 International Theory 348. See also Macdonald & MacLean, supra note 37 at 771. 64 Postema, supra note 60, in Witteveen & Van der Burg, supra note 45 at 268. See also Macdonald & MacLean, supra note 37 at 773; Wegner, supra note 57 at 886; Wendel, “Should Law Schools Teach”, supra note 16 at 529–30 (on tacit learning and law). 65 Emanuel Adler & Vincent Pouliot, “International Practices” (2011) 3 International Theory 1 at 30. 66 See also Wendel, “Should Law Schools Teach”, supra note 16 at 500. 67 Wegner, supra note 57 at 887. See also Barnhizer, supra note 48 at 20–23.

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from a ‘trades’ approach (that persists in some milieu)68 to a still-uncomfortable ‘liberal education’ model. Meanwhile, the intellectual tradition of law studies within the university is more firmly implanted in Europe. Whatever the cause, over the last century, legal education in North America has seen dramatic shifts and regular cries of concern. In 1914, the Carnegie Foundation – presumably sensing a problem – commissioned the distinguished Austrian civilian, Professor Josef Redlich, to visit American university law schools and to assess their quality.69 In a thoughtful and balanced report, Professor Redlich concluded that although the focus on court cases was perfectly suited to teaching common law legal method, and even represented the ‘nature’ of the common law,70 it undervalued systematization and failed to help students grasp the mission of law in society.71 American law professors still needed to create ‘a scientific system of the common law’ enabling students to see the big picture, and this the case method demonstrably failed to deliver.72 It is important to note that Redlich’s Germanic notion of legal science treated law as fundamentally normative, based on understandings of what ‘“ought to be” rather than … [what] “is”’.73 Redlich’s science of law stands in stark contrast to another self-proclaimed ‘scientific’ view of a slightly earlier day, promoted by Christopher Columbus Langdell at Harvard.74 Langdell famously argued that ‘[i]f law be not a science, … it is a species of handicraft, and may best be learned by serving an apprenticeship’.75 Like Redlich, Langdell wanted systematization, but thought that it could be derived from empirical observation, as in the natural sciences. By parsing cases and comparing them over time, one could derive ‘certain principles or doctrines’: To have such a mastery of these as to be able to apply them with constant facility and certainty to the evertangled skein of human affairs, is what constitutes a true lawyer; and hence to acquire that mastery should be the business of every earnest student of law.76

Soon after becoming Dean at Harvard, Langdell went so far as to decree that jurisprudence should no longer be a required part of the curriculum.77 Both ‘scientific’ understandings of law have given rise to later claims of crisis in legal education. The idea of normative science is rooted in legal positivism, challenged by all theorists of natural law,78 legal realists,79 legal pluralists,80 and more recently by a broad school of ‘law and society’ scholars.81 Meanwhile the doctrinally focused case-law approach to law and legal education has also given rise to extensive critique. Langdell’s ‘science’ of legal education was attacked head-on by the American legal realists. In a harsh essay, Karl Llewellyn took on the Langdell model because ‘it blinds, it stumbles, it conveyor-belts, it wastes,

68 See e.g. Jordan Furlong, “Law school and the risk of irrelevance”, The Lawyer’s Weekly (20 August 2010) 22, online: Lawyer’s Weekly (‘[l]aw schools need to appreciate that the legal profession is, essentially, their customer base: law firms (and the clients they represent) purchase law schools’ stock in trade (law graduates)’ at 22). 69 Josef Redlich, The Common Law and the Case Method in American University Law Schools: A Report to the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, Bulletin No 8 (Boston: DS Updike, The Merrymount Press, 1914), online: Hathi Trust , thoroughly reviewed in Maxeiner, supra note 56. 70 Redlich described the case method as ‘an entirely original creation of the American mind in the realm of law’: Redlich, supra note 69 at 9, cited in Maxeiner, supra note 56 at 10. See also ibid. at 10, 15, 17. 71 Maxeiner, ibid. at 1. 72 Redlich, supra note 69 at 63, cited in Maxeiner, supra note 56 at 35. 73 Redlich, supra note 69 at 56, cited in Maxeiner, supra note 56 at 34. 74 Redlich explicitly rejects Langdell’s approach; see Redlich, supra note 69 at 55–6 et passim, cited in Maxeiner, supra note 56 at 34. 75 [Christopher C] Langdell, Address at the “Quarter-Millennial” Celebration of Harvard University (5 November 1886), reprinted in (1887) 3 Law Q Rev 123 at 124. 76 CC Langdell, A Selection of Cases on the Law of Contracts, 1st ed (Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1871) at vi. 77 Barnhizer, supra note 48 at 11. 78 See e.g. John Finnis, Natural Law and Natural Rights (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980). 79 See e.g. Karl Llewellyn, The Bramble Bush: On Our Law and its Study (New York: Oceana, 1930). 80 Fuller, supra note 43. 81 Martha-Marie Kleinhans & Roderick A Macdonald, “What is a Critical Legal Pluralism?” (1997) 12 CJLS 25.

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it mutilates, and it empties’.82 Llewellyn argued that legal education had to take account of what lawyers do, but also had to consider the development of professional character, not merely the articulation of doctrine. Fifty years later, a distinguished legal historian and theorist felt the need to take on the realist heritage in American law teaching and its positivist underpinnings. In a short article from 1985, matching in tone the screed of Llewellyn, Harold Berman argued:

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We have been overwhelmed by the belief that law is politics and politics in a rather narrow sense: not in the sense that Aristotle meant when he said law is politics, but more in the sense of Max Weber and V.I. Lenin meant when they said law is politics … Of course law is politics. But law is also morality. And law is also history. Law is not only something that is made by those who are in power; law is also something that is given. The legislators and judges are not only its masters. They are also its creatures.83

As between Langdell’s science and Llewellyn’s realism, Berman responds, ‘A plague on both your houses’. In Canada, writing from a very different perspective, but with an equal sense of frustration, Harry Arthurs offered a scathing critique of legal education, suggesting that it was self-referential and disconnected from the intellectual life of the wider academy.84 He argued for an opening up of law and legal education to fresh intellectual winds through a much more serious commitment to interdisciplinary learning and research. Arthurs concluded some years later that his call for reform had ‘made little if any impression on Canadian law school curricula’.85 By the 1990s, the sense that US law schools were in crisis had grown, possibly as a result of the political ennui lingering after the Watergate debacle, the financial excesses of the 1980s (after all, this was the era of The Bonfire of the Vanities),86 and the swiftly rising cost of an American legal education. Various cris de coeur were published,87 but for the legal academy at least, the most influential was Yale Dean Anthony Kronman’s The Lost Lawyer.88 Calling for the resurrection of a discarded ideal, that of the ‘lawyer-statesman’, Kronman described professionals who exercise practical wisdom infused with the virtue of ‘civic-mindedness’.89 Legal education needed to avoid both cynicism (one hears echoes of Berman’s ‘law is more than the politics of power’) and technocracy (law is not Langdell’s doctrinal science; nor is it merely a branch of economics). Yet, intriguingly, Kronman’s prescription for legal education was to rebuild the late nineteenth-century commitment to Socratic dialogue that Langdell pioneered.90 For Kronman, however, the point of this dialogue would not be to derive principles from nature, but to foment the ‘moral imagination’.91 So at the end of the twentieth century, we return to the beginning, with Redlich’s description of the caselaw method as inherent in the nature of common law, but Kronman appears to be no closer to answering Redlich’s question how to rise above the details of cases to create a more expansive, social, understanding of law. 82 Karl Llewellyn, “On What is Wrong With So-Called Legal Education” (1935) 35 Colum L Rev 651 at 653. See also Jerome Frank, “Why not a Clinical Lawyer-School?” (1933) 81 U Pa L Rev 907. 83 Berman, supra note 58 at 348. 84 Consultative Group on Research and Education in Law, Law and Learning: Report to the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (Ottawa: Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, 1983) passim [Arthurs Report]. 85 Harry Arthurs, “Madly Off in One Direction: McGill’s New Integrated, Polyjural, Transsystemic Law Programme” (2005) 50 McGill LJ 707 at 714, n 16. 86 Tom Wolfe, The Bonfire of the Vanities (New York: Picador, 2008). 87 See e.g. Mary Ann Glendon, A Nation Under Lawyers: How the Crisis in the Legal Profession is Transforming American Society (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1994); Sol M Linowitz with Martin Mayer, The Betrayed Profession: Lawyering at the End of the Twentieth Century (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996). 88 Anthony T Kronman, The Lost Lawyer: Failing Ideals of the Legal Profession (Cambridge, Mass: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1993). And see the analysis of Kronman’s argument in Mootz, supra note 50 at 1265–8. 89 Kronman, supra note 88 at 109. 90 Ibid. at 110. 91 Ibid. at 113.

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Indeed, in a forceful critique of North American legal education issued in 2007, the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, the same foundation that commissioned the Redlich report in 1914, stressed that an over-reliance on the case-law method led to ‘a striking conformity in outlook and habits of thought among legal graduates’.92 While acknowledging, as Redlich had almost a century before, that in its ideal form the case-law method provides strong training in logic and is a ‘potent form of learning by doing’,93 the 2007 Carnegie authors reject the idea that the case method of teaching is inherent in the common law method, at least as that method (whatever it is) is experienced in the practice of law.94 The Carnegie authors go further, suggesting that the case method is both an oversimplification of and an abstraction from ‘life’, and that it undervalues the social effects of law which in turn tends to mask fundamental ethical issues.95 ‘The danger for second- and third-year students is that the analytic blinders they have laboriously developed may never come off when they deal with the law or with clients’.96 Other commentators have also noted the growing practical challenges to the sophisticated employment of the case method: to operate as Socrates supposedly did requires enormous preparation, a devotion of resources to teaching that most law schools cannot or will not achieve and a talented professoriate dedicated at least equally (if not primarily) to teaching as opposed to research.97 A. ‘Thinking Like a Lawyer’ Much of contemporary legal education is devoted to helping students ‘think like a lawyer’.98 The challenges to the case-law method that I have reviewed point clearly to a tough question: is ‘thinking like a lawyer’ enough? For Kronman, the method, in the idealized form he describes, would excite the moral imagination.99 For one of the authors of the 2007 Carnegie report, on the other hand, the case-law method and related analytical approaches have served to ‘domesticate doubt’. And we have seen that the Carnegie report suggests that the method, for all its strengths analytically, can serve to distance law students from pertinent complexities of life.100 Perhaps domesticating doubt is part of the problem.101 To reduce doubt artificially (by reducing the scope of legal thinking to rules-based ‘analytical’ approaches alone) is to instrumentalize law, to see it as an exercise in problem solving rather than society building and to reduce the scale of ‘law’s cosmos’, to adopt Nicholas Kasirer’s terminology. Law can be much more than a projection of ‘oughts’ – an imperial project. It can be a way of thinking, a way of knowing and even a way of being – a cosmological project,102 but this project requires openness to the complexities of life as understood through cognate disciplines (philosophy, sociology, anthropology, economics, etc.), through the rigours of sophisticated analogy and comparison, and through the exercise of practical wisdom.103  92 William M Sullivan et al, Educating Lawyers: Preparation for the Profession of Law (Stanford, Cal: The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, 2007) at 186 [Carnegie report].  93 Ibid. at 74.  94 Ibid. at 81.  95 Ibid. at 187. See also the detailed discussion of the 2007 Carnegie report in Maxeiner, supra note 56, passim; Toni Fine, “Reflections on US Curricular Reform” (2009) 10 German Law Journal 717, passim.  96 Sullivan et al, supra note 92 at 142.  97 See e.g. Macdonald & MacLean, supra note 37 at 747–8; Mootz, supra note 50 at 1299–1300.  98 See e.g. Maxeiner, supra note 56 at 15, citing Redlich, supra note 69 at 24 et passim.  99 See Kronman, supra note 88. 100 Wegner, supra note 57 at 893–4. 101 One of the authors of the Carnegie report reveals that for most of the law professors and law students surveyed, internalization of a process of ‘questioning’ was seen as central to legal reasoning: Wegner, ibid. at 895–6. 102 Nicholas Kasirer, “Bijuralism in Law’s Empire and in Law’s Cosmos” (2002) 52 J Legal Educ 29, especially at 30–31, 36. 103 See ibid. This approach to legal thinking is more specific than the ‘thinking critically’ answer that seems so often to be offered as a description of legal reasoning – as if other disciplines had no critical capacity. See Wegner, supra note 57 at 900. It is important to emphasize as well that for very practical reasons, lawyers need to revel in uncertainty: most issues that come before us are not ‘packaged’ in any way. Situations have a way of changing, and a ‘case’ may turn out to be about something entirely other than we first imagine. See James C Freund, Lawyering: A Realistic Approach to Legal Practice (New York: Law Journal Seminars-Press, 1979) at 15–16, quoted in Macdonald & MacLean, supra note 37 at 775, n 157 (on the ‘formlessness’ of problems facing practising lawyers).

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To recur to Vico’s anti-Cartesian view of education: law students need to develop a refined capacity to ‘see new arguments based on probabilities in situations of uncertainty’.104 This does not imply that law exists only, or even primarily, in a world of ideas.105 The rich concept of ‘practice’ traced out in Section III, above, provides a way of thinking about lived experience as integral to law’s reflexivity, without turning law into a trade like butchering or plumbing. We are not, therefore, presented with the dichotomy that seems to have been assumed in much of the late twentieth-century writing on legal education: law must be corrected and expanded through external critique (the various ‘law and … ’ movements)106 or it must be acknowledged as purely instrumental by connecting law only to what clients need and want.107 Instead, by seeing law as a form of practical wisdom rooted in life experience, the richness of human knowledge can be included within law, but that knowledge is tested in particular ways through practice. The result is, as Wendel puts it, the ‘moral and social dimensions of legal reasoning are … embedded within legal reasoning … [because] formal knowledge is not prior to practice’.108 V. Legal Education, and Personal and Professional Responsibility It is now time to return to the case of the US government lawyers who, for a while, succeeded in their argument that the concept of ‘torture’ could – and should – be so narrowly defined as to allow for the waterboarding of terrorist suspects. In considering what a complete understanding of ‘practice’ looks like, and by connecting that understanding to an approach to legal education rooted in practical wisdom, helping students to an appreciation of ‘new arguments based on probabilities in situations of uncertainty’,109 have we learned anything that might help to explain the actions of those government lawyers? More importantly, can we draw out lessons that might discourage future lawyers from adopting similar positions in eras dominated by fear?110 The answers to these questions have great import. In part this is because lawyers have a dominating role in North American society. Despite all the lawyer jokes and the supposed disdain in which the profession is held, at least according to polling data,111 many people in our society still tend to defer to the judgment of lawyers. Any lawyer who has volunteered for civil society organizations can attest to the degree to which lawyerly skills remain in demand. Although the economic fortunes of the profession are of course tied to the wider economy and have experienced a significant jolt since 2008, business demand for legal services is not evaporating. And the deference to lawyers shows up as well in public life. There are still far more lawyers in Parliament or Congress than there are scientists, doctors, engineers or entrepreneurs. Indeed, even on the 104 See Mootz, supra note 50 at 1295. 105 See Barnhizer, supra note 48 (‘[n]o practicing lawyer or judge with whom I have ever interacted sits around in an office and “ideates”. The point is that idea, strategic perception, and action are inseparably connected. They are intertwined elements of a single system with each reinforcing and informing the other’ at 21). 106 See e.g. Janet E Mosher, “Legal Education: Nemesis or Ally of Social Movements?” (1997) 35 Osgoode Hall LJ 613. 107 Consider the experience of this law student interviewed for the 2007 Carnegie report: ‘You realize your thinking has changed, your values and the depth of your understanding. It leaves you with less creativity. [Thinking like a lawyer] reduces my role and focuses my attention on being an advocate for someone else’ (Wegner, supra note 57 at 915 [additional text introduced by Wegner]). 108 Wendel, “Should Law Schools Teach”, supra note 16 at 498 [emphasis in original]. See also ibid. at 529–30, 540–41. 109 Mootz, supra note 50 at 1295. 110 See Stephen J Toope, “Human Rights and the Use of Force after September 11th, 2001” in Daniel J Sherman & Terry Nardin, eds, Terror, Culture, Politics: Rethinking 9/11 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006) 236; Stephen J Toope, “Fallout from ‘9–11’: Will a Security Culture Undermine Human Rights?” (2002) 65 Sask L Rev 281. 111 See e.g. Roy Morgan Research, “Roy Morgan image of professions survey 2012: Nurses still most highly regarded, politicians at 14 year lows” (14 May 2012), online: Roy Morgan ; Jeffrey M Jones, “Automobile, banking industry images slide further: Most other major industries’ images have improved this year” (Gallup Work and Education Poll) (17 August 2009), online: Gallup .

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specific issue of torture, it is notable how the senior leadership in the US sought lawyerly benediction for policies of ‘aggressive’ questioning of terrorist subjects. When asked by a reporter on network television, ‘Why is waterboarding legal, in your opinion?’, former President Bush answered simply, ‘Because the lawyer said it was legal’.112 That deference leads to the conclusion that lawyers bear a heavy responsibility for the advice they give, the arguments they make, the institutions and systems they design and the negotiation and dispute settlement they undertake. Our roles are myriad, and the consequences of our decisions and actions can be enormous. It is common to say that, unlike doctors, our work is not ‘life and death’. Even that is not necessarily true. After the early legal opinions were issued authorizing aggressive interrogations on terrorist subjects, a CIA detainee in a secret prison in Kabul died of hypothermia after he was stripped and chained outside for many hours.113 We may never know how many other people died in secret prisons spotted around the world at the behest (and sometimes under the direct control) of US security forces. The stakes are even higher when one considers the role that lawyers typically play in the design of public systems of governance. If our instincts are wrong, our conceptions of law and how it functions flawed, we can create opportunities for deep resentment and a complete failure in public confidence; the consequences can be deadly. Ask the people of the former Yugoslavia. It should come as no surprise that many observers have called upon legal education to focus as much on the education of ‘citizens’ as ‘professionals’,114 echoing Kronman’s desire to create ‘lawyer-statesmen’.115 Yet one could argue that this call is not nearly precise enough. One would hope that any well-educated person in our society is exposed to the demands and aspirations of citizenship. Although there is much evidence that the liberal arts ideal of ‘educating citizens’ is collapsing under the weight of specialization, careerism and high cost,116 the ideal should presumably remain available to a range of students wider than those who choose to study law, even if they cannot attend elite liberal arts colleges. Rather than talking of ‘citizenship’ in general, as important as that is, the more interesting and fruitful question is whether or not there are particular aptitudes and virtues associated with being a lawyer, at least in a Western society.117 I have already answered in the affirmative, at least as aptitudes are concerned, in suggesting that the form of reasoning known as ‘practical wisdom’ is what lawyers need to learn and enhance in their education and throughout their day-to-day work. In describing ‘interactional law’ (Section III), I showed how the very idea of legal obligation, which is often simply assumed, is rooted in shared social understandings which solidify into law when connected to certain criteria of legality. But this ‘law’ must be maintained and supported constantly by communities of practice if it is not to fade into desuetude. The practical wisdom of lawyers, constantly navigating through the complex channels of social life, upholds and furthers legal obligation and the rule of law. The aptitudes of reasoning by analogy, exercising empathetic judgment, drawing creative connections through thoughtful and open-spirited comparison, and sophistication in the design of complex institutions are all relevant, all required in the ‘play’ of law in practice. But how is this connected to the personal and professional responsibility of lawyers? A starting proposition for legal education is that:

112 See Frank James, “Bush says waterboarding was legal, but was it moral?”, National Public Radio (9 November 2010), online: NPR . 113 Dana Priest, “CIA holds terror suspects in secret prisons”, The Washington Post (2 November 2005), online: WP . 114 See e.g. Kasirer, supra note 102 at 33. Kasirer goes on to specify that (bijural) legal education ‘should provide a cosmopolitan citizenship’ (ibid. at 39, citing generally Daniel Downes & Richard Janda, “Virtual Citizenship” (1998) 13 CJLS 27). 115 Kronman, supra note 88. 116 See Mark Yates, “The Carnegie Effect: Elevating Practical Training over Liberal Education in Curricular Reform” (2011) 17 Journal of the Legal Writing Institute 233 at 242–4. 117 See Mootz, supra note 50 at 1262. In making a similar argument, Mootz talks of virtues and ‘skills’. I prefer the term ‘aptitudes’ because I think it is wider in ambit, encompassing qualities of reason that do not properly fit in the idea of a ‘skill’.

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professor and student are not merely role-players in an abstract game to which their commitment is merely contingent, but are human beings endowed with the capacity and charged with the responsibility for improving the social institutions through which people can pursue their life projects.118

Four important ideas are found in this short quotation: first is that at a high level, not associated with specific moral commitments, law is purposive, not static or simply ‘received’. It exists to facilitate the gathering together of people in a society, allowing them to articulate and pursue common purposes. Second, law is not abstracted from that society, but rooted in it. Third, law is not a game in the trivial sense, for law actually allows the common purposes of people in society to be furthered. Fourth, students and professors must truly commit to explore law together, for legal education is not instrumental (a ‘training’ school) but is partly constitutive of law itself. Even as a law student, then, and certainly as a law professor, one’s task is fundamentally connected to the existence and health of law itself. If one believes in the possibility, or even more in the necessity, of a ‘rule of law’ in society, then one’s responsibility is manifest. In the words of Wendel: If … respect for the law is a way of respecting the inherent dignity and equality of one’s fellow citizens, even in the circumstances of deep disagreement about what morality requires, then there is something intrinsically good about the rule of law. The ethics in lawyering can therefore be understood, not in terms of underlying moral goods to be pursued through legal means, but in terms of the non-instrumental value of legality as a virtue of societies characterized by tolerance and respect for all citizens.119

It is in the very reasoning and actions of legal practice itself that the ethical obligations of law, the personal and professional responsibilities, are assumed and worked out.120 Now it is possible to offer tentative explanations as to why some distinguished lawyers in the Office of Legal Counsel offered up arguments for the legality of waterboarding and other forms of ‘aggressive’ interrogation techniques that seem so laboured, so unconvincing. If one starts from the proposition that the Al Qaeda suspects are outside established frameworks of law, as they are not citizens, not within the territory of the United States and not ‘prisoners of war’, the ‘society’ which gives context (shared understandings) to law becomes harder to identify. In a world that still accords so much value to the state, despite the many challenges to its hegemony that are discussed by other contributors to this Stateless Law collection, it is still easier to see fluidity and uncertainty in a society denominated ‘international’. So the lawyer may assume a degree of interpretative freedom greater than when he or she operates within the bounds of a domestic ‘system’ of law. Hence the not altogether disingenuous arguments put forward that international law does not contain a precise definition of torture.121 But even when trying to define torture using American law, the OLC lawyers managed to play fast and loose with interpretative techniques. One could defend their approach by suggesting that they were doing what good lawyers do as part of play through practice: exercising creativity in the use of analogy. How can one say that they went too far? As I have already hinted, the answer is found in the concept of practical wisdom, and in Vico’s notion that in situations of uncertainty lawyers must be helped to develop ‘the prudence to choose appropriately when the matter is not subject to calculation’.122 As I have stressed, play through practice – the delight in intellectual play tempered by recognition of the consequences for people in the world – requires not just creativity and flexibility, but pragmatism as well. In practice, lawyers must temper ideas with life experience. The OLC lawyers found ‘a way’ to argue that the definition of physical pain and suffering could be narrowed. Their argument was superficially creative (looking to a statute on the provision of health care to define pain and suffering as a result of torture) and even clever. But it was not ‘prudent’, not tested against life experience: 118 Macdonald & MacLean, supra note 37 at 768. 119 Wendel, “Should Law Schools Teach”, supra note 16 at 517. 120 The process is complicated and often messy. It is rarely heroic, pace Ronald Dworkin, Law’s Empire (Cambridge, Mass: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1986). 121 Brunnée & Toope, Legitimacy and Legality, supra note 3 at 256–9. 122 Mootz, supra note 50 at 1282.

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how else can one explain the anodyne descriptions of what happened to the suspects subjected to aggressive interrogation techniques offered by Professor Yoo and others?123 The disconnect between what they say they imagined and what actually happened is extreme, because they had no relevant experience to call upon and, it seems, no empathetic judgment or ‘moral imagination’,124 to adopt Kronman’s terminology. How could that be? How could smart people who had gone to some of the best law schools in the United States, lack moral imagination? If one reviews the criticisms of North American legal education lodged quite consistently over the last hundred years, we can tease out a convincing and expansive explanation: the dominance of instrumentalism. In diverse ways, law students have been inculcated with the belief that law is a ‘tool’. For legal realists and their successors amongst critical theorists, law is what those in power (public and private power) want to see happen. For legal positivists, law is what the hierarchical, pedigreed institutions of society (usually the state) say it is. For the myriad purveyors of ‘law and … ’ studies, especially law and economics, law is what is used to pursue externally determined ends. These approaches, with their many variations, have dominated the law schools, with ebbs and flows of influence, for the last century. If law is nothing more than an instrument to pursue goals outside itself, if it has no intrinsic value, the freedom to manipulate is almost complete. As long as one can make ‘an argument’ it is an acceptable argument. And if the law is but an instrument, the important question is only: ‘What do I need to have happen in law in order for my goals to be met?’ One sees this attitude expressly in the argument put forth by Professor Yoo that the President as Commander-in-Chief could override even the modest limitations on torture contained in US statute law because the limitations prevented the President ‘from gaining the intelligence he believes necessary to prevent attacks upon the United States’.125 In considering the creation of the McGill programme, because it engaged an entire Faculty in thinking through the aspirations our society has for legal education, it became necessary to question and debate (admittedly sometimes only implicitly) the various schools of legal theory and explanations of law’s influence that had been offered up over the centuries. In that questioning, I sense that only one fundamental conceptual conclusion was reached: purely instrumental accounts of law could not be reconciled with the history of law teaching at McGill.126 Needless to say, professors and students otherwise retained their own views of their life purposes! But even a single conclusion can be important. The McGill programme, with its tendency to undermine pure instrumentalism in understandings of law,127 points one way to encourage students to consider ‘the rhetorical elucidation of prudent action under conditions of uncertainty’.128 It opens up the possibility that there may be something intrinsically good about law. Other means must surely exist that would reveal the same opportunities; ‘transsystemic’ teaching cannot be the only way to undercut instrumentalism.129 If we are to address more comprehensively the criticisms of North American legal education that have re-emerged with consistency throughout the last century, however, I believe that we must pursue that one fundamental conceptual conclusion of the McGill programme.

123 See supra text accompanying notes 34 to 36. 124 Kronman, supra note 88 at 113. 125 See Goldsmith, supra note 8 at 144 (arguing that it was an overreaching as to the prerogative powers of the President that was one of the greatest weaknesses in the legal analysis of the First Yoo Memo). 126 See e.g. Roderick A Macdonald, “The National Law Programme at McGill: Origins, Establishment, Prospects” (1990) 13 Dal LJ 211; Julie Bédard, “Transsystemic Teaching of Law at McGill: ‘Radical Changes, Old and New Hats’” (2001) 27 Queen’s LJ 237; Yves-Marie Morissette, “McGill’s Integrated Civil and Common Law Program” (2002) 52 J Legal Educ 12. 127 See Macdonald & MacLean, supra note 37 at 727–55. 128 Mootz, supra note 50 at 1268. 129 Indeed, it may well be that we should stop looking for any single way to promote ‘good’ legal education. Although bar associations and related groups typically seek to impose uniformity because they mistakenly see legal education in terms of substantive categories of necessary knowledge, perhaps we should accept that there should be a strong diversity of legal programmes at different schools, aiming to graduate lawyers who have different callings. See e.g. Yates, supra note 116 at 252–3; Maxeiner, supra note 56 at 25–6; Barnhizer, supra note 48 at 42. The common denominator would be that they all recognize that law itself matters in our society; it is not just a ‘tool’.

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VI. A Final Plea Let me conclude with a plea to law professors and law students. You are not disconnected from the ‘practice’ of law even if you never work directly for a client or step into a courtroom. Your teaching and learning together is part of what constitutes law and the understanding of law in our society. Your work helps to make, sustain and break law. To the extent that you come to conceive of law as infinitely malleable, as merely a tool to achieve exogenous ends, as a purely intellectual game divorced from consequence for real people, you are helping to destroy the rule of law, exposing your fellow human beings to risks that may be hard to calculate in advance, but are often horrifying in retrospect. Without a widely shared understanding that law matters in a society, and that all people are both empowered and constrained by law, people can be subjected to torture. People can die. Societies can disintegrate. That is the root of our responsibility, both professionally and personally.

Chapter 14

Qu’est-ce qu’une « faculté » de droit? De la philosophie au droit. (Petits jeux autour de la question) Downloaded by [University of California, San Diego] at 23:17 11 March 2017

Vincent Forray*

I. Introduction Ce chapitre consiste à interroger ce qu’est une faculté de droit à partir du double sens du mot « faculté », comme « aptitude » et « lieu où l’on enseigne ». A titre préliminaire, il faut insister sur le fait que l’idée de connaissance relie les deux sens du mot.1 Cela donne à penser que la « faculté de droit » – comme aptitude et comme lieu – doit être comprise à partir d’une certaine conception de la connaissance. Une piste suivie par le présent travail indique qu’une telle conception plonge ses racines au cœur de la modernité. Plus précisément, elle s’accroche au discours philosophique préoccupé par la possibilité de savoir. Il me semble que la question « que puis-je savoir? » structure encore l’institution (Faculté) chargée de développer les aptitudes (facultés) des étudiants au droit et, donc, ce que doivent être ces aptitudes elles-mêmes. Le droit, au cœur de la « faculté de droit » demeurerait, de cette manière, dans un lien de subordination vis-à-vis de la philosophie. Il existe une autre idée de l’aptitude au droit qui entre en concours avec cette approche. Une idée qui provient du droit dont les juristes font l’expérience. Juges, avocats, notaires, praticiens disposent d’une « faculté de droit » irréductible à l’enseignement facultaire. Il semble donc possible de dénouer le lien entre l’aptitude au droit et la « possibilité de connaître » le droit. Pour donner à voir un tel dénouement, je procèderai au moyen d’une sorte de transgression de la forme du discours universitaire, en démarrant par une interrogation d’allure saugrenue qui porte sur le jeu de mots. II. Le jeu Peut-on jouer sur les mots? Disposons-nous de cette faculté? Avons-nous le droit de jouer sur les mots « faculté de droit »? En fait, nous devrions pouvoir nous divertir de cette expression « faculté de droit ». Elle est amusante parce que, en un certain sens du mot « droit », elle ne veut rien dire. Il arrive que le droit – a right – désigne un pouvoir; un pouvoir de la volonté,2 an ability to change legal relationships3 ou le pouvoir de faire ce qu’on * Le travail nécessaire à ce texte a été mené grâce au soutien de la Faculté de droit de l’Université McGill. Je veux remercier les participants à l’atelier dans lequel il a été présenté lors du colloque « Le droit hors d’État – L’avenir de la discipline » pour leurs remarques et leurs commentaires, en particulier Mark Antaki et Maxime Saint-Hilaire. J’adresse également mes remerciements à Lionel Smith, Shauna van Praagh et Helge Dedek pour m’avoir encouragé à le publier. Toutes les erreurs sont les miennes. 1 Voir en ce sens le Trésor de la Langue Française informatisé, sub verbo « faculté », en ligne: Centre National de Ressources Textuelles et Lexicales . 2 Friedrich Carl von Savigny, Traité de droit romain, traduit par Charles Guenoux, t 1, Paris, Librairie de Firmin Didot Frères, 1855 à la p 7; voir généralement Paul Roubier, Droits subjectifs et situations juridiques, réédition avec une préface de David Deroussin, Paris, Dalloz, 2005 [première édition: 1963]. 3 Wesley Newcomb Hohfeld, « Some Fundamental Legal Conceptions as Applied in Judicial Reasoning » (1913) 23 Yale LJ 16, tel que cité par Brian Bix, Jurisprudence: Theory and Context, 6e éd, Londres, Sweet & Maxwell; Thomson Reuters, 2012 à la p 134. 1

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n’est pas obligé de ne pas faire.4 Un pouvoir, donc une faculté.5 Une faculté de faculté, ce qui n’a guère de sens. Ou bien un droit de faculté, ce qui pourrait vouloir dire un peu plus. On songerait à un droit à la faculté. Un droit d’étudier, un droit d’entrer à la faculté, donc (à quelles conditions? selon quels critères? quelle sélection?). C’est aussi la question des droits d’entrée dans une faculté qui serait posée. Il reste qu’un tel propos ne serait pas très sérieux. Quoique nous serions probablement prêts à dire que les questions qu’il rencontre le sont: le droit subjectif, l’accès aux études universitaires, le rapport entre droit et right sont des questions sérieuses. C’est la manière d’amener le propos qui ne l’est pas. Un discours académique qui procède d’un jeu de mots ne se donne pas comme sérieux. Il ne présente pas à l’interlocuteur les garanties suffisantes pour accéder au statut de discours théorique ou scientifique.6 Or nous nous tenons en ce lieu de l’Université pour produire, recevoir, promouvoir et questionner de tels discours. Des discours sélectionnés pour leur aptitude théorique ou scientifique. Des discours pouvant supporter un test académique – a peer review. Derrière ce test, on aperçoit une double contrainte: celle de la rationalité et celle de l’objet.7 Par « contrainte de la rationalité », je veux dire la logique du discours, un ordre qui assure la rigueur du propos ainsi que sa conformité aux formes de la connaissance.8 La rationalité confère, en un mot, autorité au discours. Par « contrainte de l’objet », je veux dire que ce dont on veut parler n’est pas indifférent à la manière dont on en parle.9 Il s’agit de la question adressée, du thème exploré; ce qui concrétise le discours et le relie à l’ensemble des discours qui se tiennent ici même. Pour l’heure, il faut parler de droit, dire quelque chose qui a à voir avec le droit hors d’état (la question reste ouverte de savoir jusqu’à quel point cet objet est lui-même le produit d’un jeu de mots entre le hors d’Etat et le hors d’état). Ceci n’est pas neutre quant à la composition du discours. L’objet du discours crée des attentes qui vont influer sur la forme du propos. Je disais pour commencer qu’en fait nous devrions pouvoir nous amuser de l’expression « faculté de droit ». Je dirais maintenant qu’en droit, nous ne le pouvons pas. A condition de retenir du mot « droit » un sens relâché10 ou bien ouvertement pluraliste.11 Un sens qui pourrait englober le code informel de présentation et les lois de composition des discours académiques. Le caractère rigoureusement juridique de telles contraintes n’est d’ailleurs pas le problème. Il suffit de relever l’existence de telles contraintes pour suspecter qu’elles pèsent sur le savoir mobilisé dans une faculté de droit. Par répercussion, on suspectera aussi qu’elles influent sur la production des discours juridiques dans une société.12 La prise de parole à la Faculté, dans un colloque par exemple, implique le respect de certaines règles qui commandent le déroulement du jeu académique. Il y a des choses qui ne se font pas. S’amuser, se distraire

 4 Jeremy Bentham, « Benefit Theory of Rights », tel que cité dans HLA Hart, Essays on Bentham: Studies in Jurisprudence and Political Theory, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1982 à la p 166.  5 Voir André Lalande, Vocabulaire technique et critique de la philosophie, Paris, Presses Universitaires de France, 1999.  6 Ce qui serait de nature à disqualifier le propos sur le plan épistémologique; comparer Jürgen Habermas, Le discours philosophique de la modernité, traduit par Christian Bouchindhomme et Rainer Rochlitz, Paris, Gallimard, 1988. Voir en particulier la « Digression sur le nivellement de la différence générique entre la philosophie et la littérature », ibid. aux pp 219–47.  7 Voir Karl Jaspers, De l’Université, préface de Jan Spurk, traduit par Ingeburg Lachaussée, Lyon, Parangon/Vs, 2008 aux pp 34–5.  8 René Poirier, « Rationalité juridique et rationalité scientifique » dans Formes de rationalité en droit, Archives de philosophie du droit, t 23, Paris, Sirey, 1978, 11.  9 Sur la manière dont le matériau juridique contraint le juriste, voir Duncan Kennedy, « Une alternative phénoménologique de gauche aux théories de l’interprétation de Hart et Kelsen » (2010) 1 Jurisprudence – Revue Critique 19; voir également Duncan Kennedy, A Critique of Adjudication (fin de siècle), Cambridge (Mass), Harvard University Press, 1997 aux pp 157–79. 10 Pour un sens évoquant une contrainte qui pèse sur la composition du discours, voir Lalande, supra note 5, sub verbo « droit », critique du sens 1 (« [d]’où les formules: ‘en droit comme en fait, en droit sinon en fait, etc.’., dans lesquelles en droit peut devenir presque exactement synonyme de logiquement ou moralement  ») et le sens 2 (« le Droit, par opposition au Fait, est, dans tout ordre de choses, le légitime par opposition au réel en tant que celui-ci peut être illégitime »). 11 Le monde académique (facultaire) serait vu comme un de ces lieux d’interactions humaines qui sécrètent de la normativité juridique. Voir Martha-Marie Kleinhans et Roderick A Macdonald « What is a Critical Legal Pluralism? » (1997) 12:2 CJLS 25 1997 à la p 32. 12 Le thème des contraintes qui s’exercent sur la production du discours en général a beaucoup occupé Michel Foucault; voir notamment Michel Foucault, L’ordre du discours, Paris, Gallimard, 1989.

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d’une expression, faire un bon mot serait se mettre hors-jeu. Il ne serait pas fair play de composer un propos académique à partir de l’intention de se divertir. Ou bien il faut en maintenir l’effet stylistique ou esthétique – une amorce, une annonce, une accroche – à l’extérieur de la partie véritablement académique du discours. À savoir cette partie qui a souscrit, quant à elle, les garanties du sérieux. Tout autre usage du procédé constituerait une transgression. Accepterions-nous de considérer un instant cette transgression juridiquement; avec tout le sérieux que commande l’attitude juridique? Il faudrait déterminer avec soin la règle transgressée. Et entamer le travail infini de l’interprétation. Imaginons maintenant le procès de celui accusé d’avoir transgressé la règle. Un juriste amené à défendre cet individu serait capable de construire une argumentation pour cela ; parce que c’est ce qu’il fait pour vivre. Il en a la capacité professionnelle, il en a la faculté. Cette faculté requiert une certaine prudence. Engagé dans un litige, un juriste sait l’imprécision des règles, la fragilité des solutions, la difficulté à répondre une fois pour toutes à une question. Celui qui a cette prudence du droit connaît l’incertitude du procès, incertitude qu’il s’emploie à limiter. Il sait aussi profiter de cette incertitude pour travailler la matière juridique. Pour la tourner à l’avantage des intérêts qu’il défend. Je ne sais pas comment finirait le procès d’un individu qui aurait transgressé la règle prescrivant le sérieux du discours académique. Mais mobiliser ici la figure de ce procès permet de percevoir une tension. Nous avons d’un côté, un discours académique refusant de se constituer selon les règles du discours académique et, de l’autre, une argumentation – celle du défenseur – qui questionnerait la source, la constitution, la portée de telles règles; une argumentation qui met ces règles en cause. Oserions-nous discuter le principe même d’une telle argumentation? Comme juristes, ce ne serait pas très prudent. Nous pouvons nous contenter d’affirmer que l’issue du procès dépend en quelque manière de la pertinence de l’argumentation. Et nous voyons se dessiner la possibilité de celle-ci. On pourrait défendre l’idée que la règle ne proscrit le jeu de mots que tant que celui-ci a pour fonction de faire rire. Mais que si une pratique sérieuse du jeu de mots existe, il n’y pas de raison de disqualifier le discours qui en découle. Il se pose alors une question un peu différente: de quel droit jouer sur l’expression « faculté de droit »? Pour y répondre, je voudrais brièvement ré-ouvrir le Conflit des Facultés d’Emmanuel Kant.13 Mon intention n’est pas d’en faire une lecture philosophique, mais d’instrumentaliser ce qu’on peut en dire afin de justifier, au bout du compte, une interprétation de la « faculté de droit ». Il s’agit donc de bricoler, comme le dit Lévi-Strauss: tâcher de produire, « à coup d’analogies et de rapprochements », un arrangement nouveau.14 J’utiliserai aussi, au soutien d’une telle entreprise, un commentaire du Conflit des facultés par Jacques Derrida dans un texte intitulé Mochlos – ou le conflit des facultés.15 III. Le jeu du Conflit Le Conflit des facultés ne comporte pas de jeu de mots. Le contraire serait étonnant. Le procédé n’est pas kantien. En outre, le mot allemand qui désigne la faculté comme lieu d’enseignement (Fakultät) diffère de celui qui désigne le pouvoir, l’aptitude, la capacité (Vermögen). Quand bien même le voudrions-nous, il ne serait pas possible de jouer sur le mot dans la langue de Kant (Le Conflit des facultés = Der Streit der Fakultäten). Et pourtant, dans le Conflit des facultés, Kant joue.16 Il fait comme si. Comme si la consistance historique de l’Université dont il parle, celle qui se présente à lui empiriquement, était de peu d’importance. Derrida

13 Emmanuel Kant, Le conflit des facultés en trois sections, traduit par J Gibelin, Paris, Vrin, 1997 [Kant, Conflit]. 14 Claude Lévi-Strauss, La pensée sauvage, Paris, Plon, 1962 aux pp 11–49, spéc à la p 35. 15 Jacques Derrida, « Mochlos – ou le conflit des facultés » dans Du droit à la philosophie, Paris, Galilée, 1990, 397 [Derrida, « Mochlos »]. 16 Kant joue peut-être sur les mots plus souvent qu’on l’imagine. Dans une parenthèse de L’impératif catégorique, Jean-Luc Nancy réserve la possibilité de ce que la Critique de la raison pure soit « façonnée de part en part » par un jeu de mot: Jean-Luc Nancy, L’impératif catégorique, Paris, Flammarion, 1992 aux pp 52–3.

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insiste sur ce point: Kant parle d’une université dont il semble qu’elle soit tout juste inventée.17 Elle aurait été imaginée par un individu qui, alors, « n’eut pas une mauvaise idée ».18 Le jeu qui démarre ne constitue pas un amusement; il est nécessaire à l’argumentation. Car il s’agit pour Kant de prescrire l’Université, ce qui suppose pour lui de transiger entre la raison et l’histoire.19 L’Université de Kant consiste d’abord en une construction projetée depuis son système de pensée – une idée. Elle se présente ensuite dans sa réalité historique, ce qui est nécessaire pour que ce que prescrit Kant puisse advenir dans le monde.20 Il faut achever de mettre l’Université en conformité avec les lois de la raison en résolvant le conflit des facultés. La première étape consiste à poser une unité : celle de l’université et du savoir. A. Le système du savoir et du lieu de savoir: Université / Faculté Le mot « université », si on en cherche le sens dans le texte de Kant, désigne une structure institutionnelle. Mais, avant cela, toujours chez Kant, il désigne une structure théorique. L’université est comme une forme du savoir. Sa construction s’élève sur la critique kantienne dont il faut se rappeler qu’elle consiste à établir des limites à la possibilité de savoir.21 La faculté de droit a, quant à elle, sa résidence dans le lieu universitaire. Elle en constitue un département: c’est-à-dire à la fois une subdivision nécessaire à l’organisation rationnelle du tout, un compartiment – une de ces « petites sociétés suivant la diversité des principales branches de la science », nous dit Kant.22 La faculté de philosophie – faculté « inférieure » – ne procède pas de cette opération de division parce que c’est elle qui en fournit le principe. Elle jouit d’un statut de liberté totale car elle représente la raison qui ne saurait être contrainte par autre chose qu’elle-même sous peine d’échouer à sa fonction d’indication de la vérité.23 Ainsi, la faculté de philosophie peut exercer un jugement scientifique sur les autres disciplines. Le rapport des autres facultés à l’université est commandé depuis la faculté de philosophie. Celle-ci fixe le schème des savoirs universitaires, et l’université, comme institution, lui donne force de loi. La faculté de droit se trouve, comme les autres, liée à cette unité conceptuelle et normative, cette totalité que rappelle le mot « université ». Nous sommes en présence d’un système philosophique qui décrète l’unité du savoir et des lieux institutionnels de savoir selon une certaine forme de rationalité. B. Le système hiérarchique: philosophie / droit Le système de Kant décrète un certain nombre de hiérarchies. Parmi elles, celle de la philosophie et du droit. La première expression de cette hiérarchie est bien connue. La philosophie détermine le droit en le fondant a priori. Tel est le projet de la Doctrine du droit qui recherche « l’ensemble des lois, pour lesquelles une législation extérieure est possible ».24 Sur ce point, toutefois, le projet kantien a vieilli. Il est impossible 17 « Il [Kant] feint de traiter cette idée [l’Université] comme une trouvaille, une bonne solution qui serait passée par la tête d’un individu très imaginatif, l’invention d’un truc assez rationnel en somme qu’un génial bricoleur aurait proposé à l’Etat de breveter »: Derrida, « Mochlos », supra 15 à la p 398 [nos italiques]. Dans le paragraphe qui précède, Derrida renvoie implicitement à la préface de Jan Spurk à l’ouvrage de Jaspers, supra note 7: « l’Université, quelle idée! ». 18 Kant, Conflit, supra note 13 à la p 14. 19 Ce genre de transaction est habituel dans la pensée politique de Kant, comme l’indique Pierre Hassner, « Emmanuel Kant » dans Léo Strauss et Joseph Cropsey, dir, Histoire de la philosophie politique, traduit par Olivier Seyden, Paris, Presses Universitaires de France, 1994, 639. 20 Mikhaïl Xifaras montre que la pensée kantienne sur le droit est constamment aux prises avec ce genre de problème: Mikhaïl Xifaras, « Droit rationnel et droit romain chez Kant. Note sur le conflit des facultés » dans Mikhaïl Xifaras, dir, Généalogie des savoirs juridiques contemporains: Le Carrefour des Lumières, Bruxelles, Bruylant, 2007, 123. 21 Voir Martin Heidegger, Qu’est-ce qu’une chose, traduit par Jean Reboul et Jacques Taminiaux, Paris, Gallimard, 1971 aux pp 129–31. 22 Kant, Conflit, supra note 13 à la p 13. 23 « Mais cette liberté de la Faculté inférieure, à laquelle il ne faut pas apporter de restriction, a pour résultat que les Facultés supérieures (elles-mêmes mieux instruites) ramènent toujours plus les fonctionnaires dans la voie de la vérité » (ibid. à la p 29). 24 Emmanuel Kant, Métaphysique des mœurs, 1e partie: Doctrine du droit, traduit par Alexis Philonenko, Paris, Vrin, 1971 à la p 103.

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d’affirmer que le droit kantien domine ce que les juristes disent du droit dans les facultés, même si certaines disciplines ou traditions juridiques en subissent encore fortement l’influence.25 Mon propos ne tient pas au droit dont parlent le Conflit des facultés et la Doctrine du droit. Il porte sur la forme du savoir mise à contribution dans les facultés de droit. Sur ce point, l’héritage kantien reste très lourd. Il est bien possible que la faculté de droit, dans tous les sens de l’expression, demeure encadrée, bordée, contrainte par une conception de son savoir qui ne lui appartient pas. Une conception dont le principe apparaît à la conjonction de deux autres manières dont Kant exprime la hiérarchie de la philosophie et du droit dans le Conflit des facultés. Nous trouvons d’abord un principe général : « la faculté de philosophie peut donc revendiquer toutes les disciplines pour soumettre à l’examen leur vérité ».26 Le principe signifie la possibilité d’une science irréductible aux sciences. Voilà qui permet à l’université de constituer l’unité de lieu dans laquelle « tout l’ensemble de la science » est traité. Nous sommes renvoyés au cœur de la philosophie kantienne dont on comprend qu’elle code le Conflit des facultés. La Critique de la raison pure27 fournit à l’Université son projet épistémologique. Nous pouvons maintenant en venir à l’autre expression de la hiérarchie de la philosophie et du droit. Plus radicale encore. Elle s’exprime dans la composition du texte kantien. Le conflit des facultés prend une forme juridique;28 c’est le droit du texte qui ordonne les rapports de la philosophie et du droit. La philosophie kantienne s’approprie et soumet la forme du droit. La philosophie est devenue juridique.29 Elle pose des règles de droit. Elle pose aussi le principe des règles de droit; la raison des règles. Voici ce qu’en dit Derrida : La pensée kantienne tente, ici aussi, d’atteindre à la légitimation pure, à la pureté du droit et à la raison comme tribunal de dernière instance. L’équivalence de la raison et de la justice comme « droit » y trouve sa présentation la plus impressionnante.30

Kant dit le droit au droit, « le droit du droit ». C. L’appropriation du droit par la philosophie Retenons du Conflit des Facultés la dilution du droit dans la philosophie au terme de la constitution d’un domaine de propriété. La faculté de droit appartient à l’université. Elle est contenue par le principe général de la connaissance scientifique, le « principe de raison ». Effet indissociable de cette contention, ensuite, la faculté de droit devient une faculté philosophique. L’aptitude au droit est en effet décidée selon les critères généraux de la connaissance – les critères posés par la philosophie. La dilution du droit dans la philosophie se fait aussi par l’intermédiaire de la forme du discours savant. Il s’ensuit une mutation: le droit (des juristes) devient un droit philosophique, en la forme. La forme philosophique du droit devient forme juridique du droit. Le discours philosophique détermine les structures du discours juridique. Premier signe de cette mutation, chez Kant: la raison, fondatrice de sa propre loi, devient un « tribunal » qui rend des « jugements ».31 L’emprunt par la philosophie kantienne au droit et son insertion dans le discours philosophique a été finement analysé par Jean-Luc Nancy : La Critique [de la raison pure] vient donc occuper la place du fondement du droit; elle est en principe chargée de dire le droit du droit, et de soustraire ainsi le jus à la causalité de sa dictio. Or c’est précisément cette opération fondatrice qui s’indique comme acte juridique par excellence: nous sommes ici devant le tribunal 25 B Sharon Byrd et Joachim Hruschka, Kant and Law, Aldershot (R-U), Ashgate, 2006. 26 Kant, Conflit, supra note 13 à la p 28. 27 Emmanuel Kant, Critique de la raison pure, traduit et présenté par Alain Renaut, 3e éd, Paris, Flammarion, 2006. 28 Une forme inaugurée par la Critique de la raison pure, ibid. On se souviendra en effet de la manière dont Kant utilise la question « quid juris? » pour poser le problème qui ouvre, dans la logique transcendantale, le chapitre consacré à la « Déduction des concepts purs de l’entendement ». 29 C’est une des idées avancées par Nancy, supra note 16 aux pp 33–60. 30 Derrida, « Mochlos », supra note 15 à la p 408. 31 Voir Jacques Derrida, Du droit à la philosophie, Paris, Galilée, 1990, aux pp 89–102 [Derrida, Droit].

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lui-même, au cœur de la critique en tant que telle. Pour cette raison, la juridiction de toute juridiction, tout autant qu’elle se dégage du statut juridique (qu’elle érige en privilège), creuse en elle-même, du même geste, la faille infinie dans laquelle elle ne peut manquer de tomber sans cesse à nouveau sur son propre cas. En d’autres termes: parce que la philosophie se pense – se dit – selon le droit, elle se pense (à moins qu’à partir de là elle ne cesse de se penser) inéluctablement comme elle-même structurée (ou affectée) par le lapsus judicii, par le glissement et la chute qui font partie intrinsèque du défaut de substance dans lequel a lieu la juridiction.32

Nous voyons ainsi, à partir de Kant, s’opérer un double mouvement. Le droit est approprié par la philosophie.33 Celle-ci se nourrit de ses catégories et en réclame la force.34 Premier mouvement. Le droit se voit aussi limité par le discours philosophique dont il reçoit les directives quant à sa forme. Dérobé à lui-même, le droit a été rattaché à la philosophie comme théorie de la connaissance. Il est ainsi pris dans une structure qui limite ses propres possibilités épistémologiques. Deuxième mouvement. Comment apprécier la portée contemporaine d’une telle structure? Je répète que ce n’est pas ce que nous disons du droit qui compte mais l’inscription de ce que nous disons dans un cadre tracé selon une certaine conception du savoir. Un enjeu important de cette inscription est le jugement. A savoir l’appréciation qui peut être portée, de l’extérieur, sur ce que nous disons. Ce que nous disons doit être appréciable. Décrypté selon un code compréhensible par quiconque aurait à juger. L’inscription dans le cadre, conformément aux règles de la rationalité, sert à cela. A rendre possible le jugement. La constitution d’un discours qui suit les contours du cadre permet d’établir un pré-jugé. Nous sommes assignés par la raison à fournir un discours qui peut être jugé a priori. Nous appelons cette capacité à être jugés l’objectivité. L’impératif qui nous conduit à construire le discours juridique en repartant toujours de l’objet « droit » procède de la philosophie. IV. La faculté de droit déterminée par la philosophie – Illustrations L’emprise de la structure philosophique du droit demeure dans nos facultés contemporaines. J’en donnerai brièvement deux illustrations. A. Le financement de la recherche à la faculté de droit Quiconque a obtenu ou tenté d’obtenir des fonds pour ses activités académiques sait à quel point le processus mobilise une réflexion a priori. En tout premier lieu, il s’agit de financer un projet. Il faut comprendre: une déclaration d’intention de ce qui va être fait. Une conception par avance, une anticipation, une projection. L’attribution du financement dépend d’un jugement porté sur cette projection. Celle-ci devrait donc présenter la rationalité qui rend la projection intelligible. C’est pourquoi le projet de recherche annonce ses objectifs. L’objectif désigne ce qui peut se voir. Ce qui peut s’apprécier, comme un objet. Il faut offrir à celui qui juge la faveur d’une appréhension des objectifs. Il s’agit rendre présents les objets visés (objectifs) par avance, autant que c’est possible. Voici donc l’objet forcément au cœur de la demande de financement de la recherche juridique – il apparaît aussi sous une forme décomposée en « jalons » ou « livrables ». Une telle objectivité rappelle à elle la conception kantienne de la connaissance. La valeur de l’énoncé scientifique, sa vérité est en effet déterminée comme « objectivité ». L’objectivité est interprétée comme rapport éthique, c’est-à-dire lucide et libre à ce qui doit donc avoir la forme, la place le statut, l’identité, la stabilité visible, fiable, disponible et calculable de l’objet. Pour constituer cette objectivité, 32 Nancy, supra note 16 à la p 55. 33 Un exemple éloquent peut-être puisé dans le Conflit des facultés qui concerne les fins poursuivies par la faculté de philosophie: « [V]ivre honnêtement, ne léser personne, être tempérant dans la jouissance et patient dans la maladie et compter alors surtout sur la spontanéité de la nature »; c’est le programme du droit naturel (qui part du droit romain rationalisé) (supra note 13 à la p 30). 34 Nietzsche joue avec un tel mouvement dans la deuxième dissertation de la Généalogie de la morale: Frédéric Nietzsche, « Généalogie de la morale – deuxième dissertation », traduit par Henri Albert, révisée par Jacques Le Rider, dans Œuvres, t 2, Paris, Robert Laffont, 2009, 803.

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au double sens de ce mot (l’attitude du sociologue et le caractère, l’être-objectif de ses objets), il faut objectiver, constituer en objets ce que les sujets (par exemple des philosophes, des héritiers ou lecteurs de Kant) n’ont su par définition objectiver de leur pratique, de leur appartenance socio-institutionnelle, de leur désir de pouvoir symbolique, etc.35

L’objet projeté devra jouer son rôle d’objet: permettre de voir la même chose quel que soit le point de vue duquel on regarde. Voilà qui est crucial parce que le jugement sur la demande de financement est expressément porté depuis l’extérieur, par un comité d’experts qui ne pratiquent pas tous la recherche juridique. Plus le projet présente d’objectivité, plus est susceptible d’appréhension par n’importe qui et plus il a de chances d’obtenir un financement. Heidegger nous dit qu’ « un objet au sens kantien rigoureux, c’est donc d’abord le représenté dans lequel le donné est déterminé de manière nécessairement et universellement valable. Une telle représentation est la connaissance proprement humaine ».36 La description d’un projet de recherche doit donner à voir l’objet visé (il se tient derrière les « objectifs » de la recherche), c’est-à-dire une connaissance. D’où la forme scientifique vers laquelle doit tendre le projet, à condition que l’on s’entende sur l’expression « forme scientifique ». Celle-ci, contrairement à ce qu’on a le réflexe de penser, ne désigne pas la conformité du projet aux méthodes des sciences dures ou exactes, mais la conformité avec un modèle général d’intelligibilité imprégné de kantisme. Le jugement synthétique a priori pourrait figurer un canon du projet de recherche. Parce qu’il constitue la structure qui permet de déterminer par avance les résultats qui, s’ils se produisent, valideront les hypothèses et feront de la recherche une réussite. Les contraintes qui pèsent sur la formulation d’un projet de recherche juridique participent, en retour, à la configuration de la faculté de droit. En effet, le projet facultaire est lié à la capacité des chercheurs à obtenir des financements. La présence à la faculté implique la constitution de projets financièrement attractifs. Il existe donc un principe de configuration des activités de recherche selon un modèle dominant, lui-même établi dans la perspective du jugement scientifique qui déclenche l’allocation des financements. Cela veut dire aussi qu’il faut penser ses activités académiques selon des modalités formelles qui échappent par définition au domaine de la faculté de droit. La deuxième illustration s’inscrit dans un domaine plus vaste: celui de l’enseignement. Il s’agit, toujours en ayant en tête le jeu de mot, d’indiquer en quoi la formation de la faculté de droit – ce qui détermine l’aptitude au droit – demeure redevable de la structure théorique imposée au droit par la philosophie. B. L’enseignement juridique et la formation de la faculté de droit En dépit des approches très diverses des phénomènes et savoirs juridiques, en dépit des expériences d’enseignement infiniment variables dans les facultés, une partie de la formation des étudiants au droit obéit à la discipline philosophique. Celle-ci fournit, en effet, aux juristes une formule pédagogique du droit. Parmi ce qui distingue invariablement l’activité des facultés de droit, il y a l’usage de certaines notions qui reviennent dans tous les cours. Certaines déterminent l’acte même d’enseigner. Il en est ainsi du « droit positif ». L’idée du droit positif apparaît nécessaire à l’enseignement. Peut-être vaudrait-il mieux dire ici: l’idée de positivité du droit.37 L’apprentissage du droit semble conditionné par la possibilité d’appréhender le droit dans sa positivité. Il s’agit d’une conception philosophique du droit, en tant qu’elle est liée à une théorie de la connaissance. Elle correspond à l’idée selon laquelle la connaissance humaine en général est subordonnée à l’élaboration d’objets, au sens kantien précédemment évoqué. La positivité du droit garantit à celui-ci une objectivité, de sorte que la science juridique porte sur un objet qu’elle cherche à connaître. L’idée de positivité du droit justifie d’affirmer que ce que nous disons à la faculté a rapport avec l’effet de droit qui se produit réellement. Ainsi, l’aptitude à faire du droit dépend, à un degré quelconque, de la connaissance du droit positif. Il faut connaître son casebook, sa jurisprudence, son code. Par conséquent, l’enseignement du droit consiste, au moins pour partie, à transmettre le droit positif. Plus précisément encore, il convient de mettre les étudiants en possession du droit positif. En d’autres termes, la fabrication et/ou 35 Derrida, Droit, supra note 31 aux pp 104–5. 36 Supra note 21 à la p 150. 37 Qui a très peu à voir avec le courant de pensée qu’on appelle positivisme juridique.

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la mobilisation d’énoncés, de catégories ou de concepts aptes à transporter le droit positif est inévitable dans l’activité d’enseignement du droit.38 Ce qui veut dire que l’enseignement emprunte, pour un motif pédagogique, la forme du droit positif. Ce motif pédagogique ne constitue pas une création propre de l’enseignement du droit. L’idée selon laquelle le droit positif présente la forme la plus accessible du droit dépasse la faculté de droit. Il s’agit d’une idée a priori du droit. Ainsi, il arrive que les étudiants de première année réclament l’indication du droit positif sans avoir de celui-ci une conception claire. En outre, le droit a cette réputation d’être réductible à des règles, de pouvoir faire l’objet d’un catalogue ou d’une formulation exacte; autant de formes objectives du droit. L’idée, simple, est qu’il y a quelque chose du droit. En conséquence, ce quelque chose doit obliger de telle sorte qu’en faisant le geste d’appréhension de ce quelque chose, on appréhende aussi l’effet de droit qui lui est associé. Or, ce geste de l’appréhension est le geste de l’apprentissage.39 Celui qui enseigne le droit a pour tâche de rendre possible un tel geste. Il lui faut organiser ce qu’il dit à partir de l’idée de droit positif. Même s’il se présente comme non positiviste, il doit au moins être en mesure de justifier la distance que son discours revendique avec le droit positif en question. L’idée de droit positif possède une remarquable puissance pédagogique. Une puissance telle que l’enseignement du droit ne semble pas pouvoir s’en dispenser. Il est possible que l’énonciation du droit positif constitue déjà l’acte d’enseigner. Lorsque, dans la salle de classe, nous commençons une phrase par « dans telle décision, la Cour suprême a jugé que …  », la réaction des étudiants donne à penser que notre discours présente la forme idéale d’un enseignement.40 Il paraît véhiculer une connaissance qui est l’objet d’un ap-prendre, d’une appréhension. Bien davantage que lorsque nous commençons une phrase telle que « le mot obligation est susceptible de plusieurs significations » qui semble en attente de sens juridique. Une telle attente est satisfaite par la fabrication d’objets intellectuels: solutions possibles, jugements, formules … L’exigence pédagogique prescrit que l’idée exprimée dans la salle de classe ait un corrélat objectif, c’est-àdire une correspondance dans le droit positif. Si l’idée de droit positif développe une telle puissance pédagogique, c’est que celui-ci apparaît dans la pensée comme une chose. Le droit positif figure l’objet du droit et, avec lui, la connaissance que l’on peut en avoir. De ce point de vue, l’idée de droit positif obéit à la théorie générale de la connaissance formalisée par Kant. Pour apprendre le droit, il faut que celui-ci apparaisse comme une chose, susceptible de ce que Heidegger appelle « la manière kantienne d’interroger la chose ». Alors, l’enseignement du droit peut procéder depuis la question « qu’est-ce que » qui est la question philosophique. « Qu’est-ce que le droit? » est une forme philosophique. A la question posée dans une salle de classe, il n’est pas de meilleure réponse que le droit positif. La question qui occupe la faculté de droit est bien « qu’est-ce que le droit positif » et l’aptitude au droit dépend, au premier chef, de la capacité d’un étudiant à y répondre. La positivité du droit correspond à une idée kantienne de la connaissance; il s’agit de ce que Kant appelle une forme. Mais il faut aller plus loin dans la correspondance, et voir que la forme philosophique du discours juridique constitue la garantie de son efficacité pédagogique. L’idée est avancée par Derrida: La possibilité d’une analogie entre le droit et la rectilinéarité a un rapport étroit avec la pédagogie, même si ce rapport apparaît principiel et virtuel.41

Nous trouvons donc, dispersés à la bordure du droit universitaire, les éléments d’une domination de la faculté de droit par la faculté philosophique du droit (qui diffère de la conception du droit philosophique; qui diffère aussi de la faculté de philosophie) elle-même indissociable des règles qui régissent la possibilité de savoir en général. Tout cela conformément à un geste kantien que clôt le conflit des facultés.

38 Comparer Aline Giroux, Le pacte faustien de l’université, Montréal, Liber, 2006 à la p 112. 39 Heidegger, supra note 21 aux pp 81–8. 40 Voir Sébastien Pimont, « Ce qu’enseigner le droit européen veut dire » dans Christophe Quézel-Ambrunaz, dir, Les défis de l’harmonisation européenne du droit des contrats, Chambéry, Université de Savoie, 2012, 257. 41 Supra note 31 à la p 78.

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Où est le problème? Il est dehors. Sur l’autre bord de la discipline juridique, mais le bord extérieur. Au point où se rompt l’unité universitaire, qui est pour nous, aujourd’hui, l’unité de la faculté de droit comme lieu et de la faculté de droit comme aptitude. Un bord que la philosophie nous interdit de rejoindre.

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V. La faculté de droit hors de la Faculté de droit La théorie/la pratique; l’étude/le métier; L’Ecole/le Palais; le savoir/le savoir-faire. Nous avons pris l’habitude de considérer que l’aptitude au droit d’un juriste se divise entre une faculté intellectuelle et une faculté professionnelle. A ces différentes facultés correspondent des lieux différents: la faculté de droit d’un côté, les professions juridiques de l’autre.42 Toutefois, cette division n’est pas le produit d’une rupture. En effet, de chacun de ses côtés il est possible de revendiquer la connaissance du droit. C’est bien en raison de leurs études juridiques que les juristes ont la capacité de devenir juristes. Les années passées à la faculté préparent à l’entrée dans la carrière juridique. Il est normal – c’est la norme et on pourra se demander qui la fixe – qu’un étudiant en droit puisse être juriste. Le passage d’un lieu du droit à l’autre se fait en ordre; selon une assignation. Et si toutes les images évoquées il y a un instant ne faisaient que révéler une relation déontique entre la théorie et la pratique, l’étude et le métier, l’Ecole et le Palais? Le signe de cette relation serait le diplôme, lui qui manifeste la possession de la faculté de droit. Le diplôme joue le rôle d’une attestation de sortie du territoire universitaire pour pénétrer sur les terres professionnelles. Mais en même temps, il rattache ad vitam celui qui le possède à l’université, devenue entretemps l’alma mater. Dans la tradition universitaire, tout se passe pour que la remise du diplôme constitue un moment inoubliable. L’inoubliable désigne ce qu’on ne peut pas oublier, ce qu’il est impossible d’oublier, ce qu’il est interdit d’oublier. Il y a une prescription dans l’acte de remettre le diplôme. Les juristes civilistes savent bien que le dépositaire – celui qui reçoit la chose – est lié au déposant, qu’il doit apporter à la chose les soins d’un bon père de famille. Les diplômes universitaires sont traités avec soin.43 On peut parfois les voir disposés comme ornements sur le lieu de travail des diplômés. Ils nous rappellent alors que ce qui nous est dit sur ce lieu de travail a un rapport avec le savoir que le diplôme signale. De ce point de vue, on ne quitte jamais l’université de laquelle on tient son savoir. C’est-à-dire un savoir qui nous qualifie socialement. L’université s’étend hors de ses bâtiments. Elle est là où est le savoir qu’elle transmet – on aura compris à quel point est sérieuse l’idée de transmission comme transfert du savoir, un savoir dont il faut alors qu’il puisse avoir été réifié – et nous nous retournons de nouveau vers Kant. L’université est bien au-delà d’elle-même. On se tromperait en pensant que les diplômés la quittent lorsqu’ils sont diplômés. Daniel Jutras, comme doyen de la Faculté de droit de McGill, l’a rappelé lors d’une cérémonie de collation des grades: l’université est au monde; elle entre dans la constitution de la société vivante. En son temps, Hegel avait parlé de « l’université du centre ».44 Corrélativement, le projet universitaire serait mis en cause si l’université perdait cette capacité à se déployer dans le monde, ce déploiement signifiant la circulation du savoir dans le corps social; signifiant aussi le mouvement de l’esprit universitaire vers les formes du gouvernement.45 On comprend alors pourquoi tout est fait pour indiquer, justifier, renforcer le lien entre l’intérieur et l’extérieur.46 Car c’est à l’extérieur de l’université – en d’autres lieux que son lieu propre – que se joue son crédit 42 Sur le thème, voir Christophe Jamin, La cuisine du droit, Paris, Lextenso, 2012 aux pp 126–49. 43 Voir l’impertinent ouvrage d’André Cabanis et Michel Louis Martin, L’universitaire dans tous ses états, Paris, Klincksieck, coll Hourvari, 2010 aux pp 22–7 (à propos des remises de diplômes). 44 GWF Hegel, Leçons sur l’histoire de la philosophie: système et histoire de la philosophie, traduit par Jean Gibelin, Paris, Gallimard, coll Folio, 2007 à la p 16. 45 « [I]l existe presque constamment une tension, et même souvent une lutte entre l’Etat et l’Université. Dans cette lutte, l’Etat est évidemment dominant … il ne peut s’agir que d’un combat intellectuel. L’initiative doit partir de l’esprit qui prend forme dans l’Université. C’est lui qui doit faire comprendre à l’Etat ce que l’Etat veut vraiment »: Jaspers, supra note 7 à la p 149. 46 Sur les mouvements entre l’« intérieur » et l’« extérieur », voir Marie Mercat-Bruns, « L’enseignement du droit aux Etats-Unis » (2010) 1 Jurisprudence – Revue critique 113 aux pp 115–17.

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et que s’éprouve son savoir. Et nous voyons réapparaître une tension. En effet, le projet universitaire avance une justification interne forte. L’argument d’une université comme lieu de tous les savoirs est scientifiquement fondé. La rationalité du projet universitaire justifie l’Université. Davantage, cette rationalité fonctionne comme garantie d’indépendance vis-à-vis des instances politiques qui pourraient perturber le développement de la connaissance pour des raisons exogènes.47 Elle concourt donc à resserrer l’université sur elle-même. Et pourtant le savoir universitaire trouve un sens en-dehors de sa propre structure. Il s’instrumentalise, et se dédouble. Il revient jusqu’au cœur de l’université et provoque une réflexion. Le savoir universitaire est éprouvé en son plus intime, questionné dans ses fondements.48 Ainsi, ceux qui ont quitté la faculté de droit pour exercer comme juristes ont développé des aptitudes particulières au droit. Ils disposent d’une faculté de droit dont le rapport avec le savoir universitaire est présumé. Présumé mais pas établi de manière très rigoureuse. On suppose que ce que fait un juriste s’explique, au moins pour partie, par le savoir acquis à la faculté. La partie subsidiaire relèverait alors de ce que, vu de la faculté, on appelle la pratique. Remarquons dans ces conditions que « la pratique » relève d’une qualification opérée selon des modes universitaires. Cette qualification est théorique, et réalisée par un geste théorique consistant à différencier ce qui se présente à nous selon nos catégories habituelles. Il y a d’un côté ce que font les juristes professionnels qui ressemble au savoir transmis dans les facultés de droit et, d’un autre côté, il y a ce qu’ils font qui n’y ressemble pas. Remarquons aussi qu’en dépit ou à l’issue de cette partition, ce qui a été qualifié de pratique semble présenter de l’intérêt pour le savoir universitaire. En effet, le savoir dispensé à la faculté de droit utilise la distinction qu’il a lui-même établie entre théorie et pratique, soit pour justifier que lui-même diffère avec raison de la pratique, soit au contraire pour revendiquer sa propre rationalité au fondement de la pratique. Il faudrait insister sur le fait que ces deux positions présentent la même structure. Mais encore, les facultés de droit – celles développées en-dehors de la faculté par d’anciens étudiants des facultés de droit – sont sollicitées à l’université. Nous sommes sans doute nombreux à pouvoir dire que les rapports que nous entretenons avec la pratique sont fructueux d’un point de vue théorique. En raison des perspectives que la pratique nous ouvre sur toute une série de questions jugées fondamentales.49 Il me semble que ce que nous considérons intéressant ne tient pas à la pratique elle-même mais à la manière dont la pratique questionne ce que nous savons – ce que nous disons.50 Il n’y a alors pas de raison de maintenir théoriquement la différence entre théorie et pratique.51 Nous avons à la place deux jeux de connaissances différents. Cette différence fait qu’ils s’interrogent l’un l’autre. Ceci ne vient pas de ce que ces jeux de connaissances ne pourraient être mobilisés que dans leurs lieux exclusifs. Autrement dit, il ne suffit pas d’affirmer que ce que nous appelons la pratique questionne notre savoir uniquement en tant que pratique ou qu’elle opère dans un contexte différent. Nous venons précisément de voir que chacun de ces jeux de connaissances se déploie dans la sphère de l’autre. En revanche, il est un point sur lequel ils s’opposent. L’un de ces jeux de connaissances est fait de telle manière qu’il détient le monopole de son propre questionnement. La philosophie fondatrice de la forme rationaliste du discours juridique protège celui-ci des critiques adressées par un ordre de savoir divergent de cette philosophie. Ce discours juridique n’admet pas qu’un questionnement sérieux ne présente pas la même forme que lui, à savoir une forme dérivée de la philosophie. Toute question pertinente impliquant la forme philosophique 47 Des raisons politiques principalement; voir Kant, Conflit, supra note 13 aux pp 28–30. 48 En Amérique du Nord, la tension entre la fonction intellectuelle et professionnelle du savoir juridique s’est considérablement accrue depuis une vingtaine d’années; voir par ex Harry T Edwards, « The Growing Disjunction between Legal Education and the Legal Profession » (1992) 91 Mich L Rev 34. Pour une critique de la culture universitaire inféodée aux seules valeurs du monde professionnel, voir Susan Sturm et Lani Guinier, « The Law School Matrix: Reforming Legal Education in a Culture of Competition and Conformity » (2007) 60:2 Vand L Rev 515. Et voir généralement Jamin, supra note 42 aux pp 117–23. 49 Voir par ex Geneviève Gondouin, « De l’enseignement universitaire du droit à une pratique juridictionnelle » (2010) 1 Jurisprudence – Revue critique 141. 50 Je me permets de renvoyer à l’un de mes textes, « Enseigner le droit complexe, redéfinir le droit en compétence – Sur une analyse américaine du programme transsystémique de McGill » (2010) 1 Jurisprudence – Revue critique 267. 51 Le mouvement pourrait se réclamer de ce qu’a écrit Pierre Bourdieu, Esquisse d’une théorie de la pratique précédé de trois essais d’ethnologie kabyle, Paris, Seuil, 2000.

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du discours juridique contient un principe d’ébranlement du savoir dominant.52 De sorte que la question ne peut être que disqualifiée. Cela explique que le jeu de connaissances utiles à ce que nous appelons la pratique – que nous reconnaissons par ailleurs comme une authentique faculté de droit – demeure complètement sousthéorisé. Du moins au regard de ce que le savoir juridique universitaire a été lui-même objet d’entreprises théoriques extrêmement poussées. Il y a là l’aveu que quelque chose nous échappe y compris dans le principe de nos connaissances juridiques. La discipline juridique vit au fil d’une tension qui n’apparaît pas, en fin de compte, comme une tension entre théorie et pratique mais comme une tension entre une forme philosophique de la connaissance juridique et une forme possiblement non-philosophique de la connaissance juridique. Ceci pose un redoutable problème à l’enseignement du droit. Celui-ci se trouve écartelé entre ces deux pôles de tension. D’une part, il doit épouser la perspective philosophique moderne qui revendique une possible vérité du droit.53 D’où l’idée de droit positif, d’où l’idée que le droit peut prendre la forme de connaissances transmissibles un peu comme des choses, d’où l’idée enfin qu’il y a des connaissances élémentaires ou axiomatiques du droit. D’autre part, il doit aussi épouser une perspective qui demeure insaisissable, largement indéterminée et que, faute de mieux, on appellera non-philosophique. Une perspective pour laquelle le droit demeure possiblement irrésolu, aporétique. Un jeu permanent de constructions provisoires. Or, les deux perspectives ne sauraient tenir ensemble qu’au prix d’une entreprise de disqualification renouvelée de la seconde. En effet, il faut rappeler ici que la forme philosophique du discours juridique se présente comme la forme pédagogique du droit. La règle de droit, comme le jugement, est enseignable; elle constitue un élément primaire, élémentaire, fondamental de l’enseignement. Un élément de vérité du droit. La forme non-philosophique du droit est alors anti-pédagogique à la mesure de la perspective du droit qu’elle ouvre, à la mesure, tout au moins, de son indifférence à l’égard du fond de vérité du droit. Ce texte n’aura eu pour ambition que de poser un problème. Comment aller de la philosophie au droit? Le premier geste serait de ne jamais refermer le conflit des facultés.

52 Voir Christian Atias, Questions et réponses en droit, Paris, Presses Universitaires de France, 2009 aux pp 70–71. 53 C’est au gigantesque corpus des justifications de la dogmatique juridique, du conceptualisme et du formalisme qu’il faudrait renvoyer. Pour un élargissement (supplémentaire) de perspective, on pourra consulter Pierre Legendre, L’amour du censeur: Essai sur l’ordre dogmatique, nouvelle éd augmentée, Paris, Seuil, 2005.

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Chapter 15

Everything Old Is New Again: Stateless Law, the State of the Law Schools and Comparative Legal/Normative History Downloaded by [University of California, San Diego] at 23:17 11 March 2017

Seán Patrick Donlan*

I. Introduction The awareness of legal and normative complexity – what some have referred to as polyjurality and I call hybridity – is growing, at least among legal academics.1 Indeed, this perception has already begun to change comparative scholarship and may, over time, fundamentally alter the place of comparative research and teaching in both the university and beyond. This new consciousness and the related developments that have formed and guide contemporary hybridity suggest the necessity of transdisciplinary perspectives and a root-and-branch reappraisal of the state-centred legal positivism that still dominates the wider legal profession. But these changes in perspective also demand, among other things, a reconsideration of our pedagogical practices. One weapon in the arsenal of legal educators interested in teaching their students the lessons of hybridity is comparative legal/normative history. That is, comparison across both space and time and of both laws and norms, might prove a useful, if more moderate, option to alternative approaches that focus on legal and normative complexity, e.g., the social sciences, the humanities, etc. Comparative legal/normative history reveals the hybridity of the past and the blurry boundaries between laws and other norms. Instead of national common laws managed by a state asserting legal exclusivity and employing efficacious sanctions, comparative legal/normative history exposes a gumbo of competing and overlapping iura and leges that were only fitfully enforced. As Kjell Å Modéer noted in a recent collection on teaching comparative legal history in Europe, the subject ‘challenges the legal concepts of modernity, where the cognitive systems are dominated by the nation state and the valid law’.2 Comparative legal/normative history also challenges the related shibboleths of legal exceptionalism. It might bring many of the benefits of polyjural studies to the most cautious, conventional curricula. In sum, for some of us, our future may be our past. Indeed, while our pedagogical approaches must be – like our subject – plural, a contextualized legal/normative history may even be the most appropriate option. As our own, our bequest and our burden, familiar yet disorienting, and constitutive of our societies and our selves, this history may have more purchase than its rivals.

* I want to thank those who commented on earlier drafts of the chapter, especially Ignazio Castellucci, Dirk Heirbaut and Aniceto Masferrer. Any remaining errors are, of course, my own. 1 On the meaning of ‘polyjural’ and ‘constitutive’, see especially Roderick A Macdonald & Jason MacLean, “No Toilets in Park” (2005) 50 McGill LJ 721 at 732–3. 2 Kjell Å Modéer, “Is Comparative Legal History Running Wild? From Function and Text to Perspectives and Contexts” in Kjell Å Modéer & Per Nilsén, eds, How to Teach European Comparative Legal History: Workshop at the Faculty of Law, Lund University, August 19–20, 2009 (Lund: Juristförlaget i Lund, 2011) 13 at 14. See also ibid. at 16 (‘legal history and comparative law today are involved in a merging process’). 1

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II. The Good Word

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A. Hybridity and History Stateless law (or non-state law) is, or so I suggest, not merely a type of law, but the focal meaning or central case of law. This is rooted in the past, on long-standing conventions about what law means. As an historical fact, law is an institutional normative order. It preceded the state, which is only an especially formal institutional form. Indeed, state legal regimes and the state legal systems that subsequently develop in the century after the French revolution were parasitic on these earlier forms of law and the concept of law they generated. To be clear, law has an established meaning and we must be careful not to be too promiscuous with it. While normativity is universal, legality isn’t, either as a concept or as a practice. There is, that is, law outside of the state, but not all normative orders qualify as law. To suggest that they are is an abuse of ordinary language that is likely to be counterproductive in the wider world, both in the Bar and beyond. Now, having noted such dangers and a strong opinion on the abuse of the term law in debates about what is often normative – rather than legal – plurality, I have to confess to my own novel use of ordinary words. My own approach to comparative normativity, past and present, is referred to as research on hybridity and diffusion.3 Hybridity relates to two related axes of investigation. The first axis is a distinction, whether seen as practical or philosophical, between normativity and legality. This division is best understood on the basis, at least in significant part, of institutional form.4 The result is that a meaningful definition of non-state laws, rooted in centuries of language use, is available without applying the term law to all forms of normative ordering. That said, lawyers should set legal study within normative scholarship more generally, if necessary by working with those beyond the law. A general theory of normativity, or even legality, cannot rest content with the state and its laws. A second, more obvious axis of hybridity divides the examination of normative and legal orders of various types on the basis of their respective titular principles and actual practices. The bottom line is that legal and normative complexity is studied as it is actually lived in society. In my defence, these terminological novelties, explicitly employing words to analogous uses, are more innocent than the use of law for all normative orders. But the scholarly ability to generate an accurate, if static image of normative and legal traditions remains insufficient without attention to the degree to which its principles are implemented in practice and alter, like practices, over time. To use a distinction made by Susan Drummond, this is an interest not only in legal and normative fixité, but in the complex and ongoing process of mixité.5 In this sense, the diffusion or movement of laws and norms, their attendant ideas and institutions, that generate, over time, different legal-normative mixes is an essential aspect of the study of hybridity. Debates on diffusion are, of course, common to comparatists, in a bewildering and occasionally enlightening vocabulary of receptions, transplants, transfers, contaminations, irritants, migrations and transfrontier mobility of law. Jurists must take general normativity, beyond legality, seriously. Social scientists, on the other hand, must respect legality’s unique normative position. Both have much to gain from the other and, indeed, from active collaboration with those others. As Baudouin Dupret has written in a different context, ‘[l]aw must be stripped of its conceptual status and returned to the fold of general normativity’.6 Non-state normativity must be understood not as a mere, minor add-on to provide context for state law, but as fundamental to the lives of people around the world, past and present, in the West and beyond. For all the brilliance of legal academics, 3 See especially Seán Patrick Donlan, “To Hybridity and Beyond: Reflections on Legal and Normative Complexity” in Vernon Valentine Palmer, Mohamed Y Mattar & Anna Koppel, eds, Mixed Legal Systems, East and West (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2014); Seán P Donlan, “The Mediterranean Hybridity Project: At the Boundaries of Law and Culture” (2011) 4 Journal of Civil Law Studies 355 at 368–70. 4 A merely practical distinction, rooted in contemporary convention dividing state law from non-state norms, may also be appropriate for many purposes. 5 Susan G Drummond, “Dishing Up Israel: Rethinking the Potential of Legal Mixité” (2008) 26 Windsor YB Access J 163 at 169. See also Susan Drummond, “Prolegomenon to a Pedestrian Cartography of Mixed Legal Jurisdictions: The Case of Israel/Palestine” (2005) 50 McGill LJ 899. 6 Baudouin Dupret, “Legal Pluralism, Normative Plurality, and the Arab World” in Baudouin Dupret, Maurits Berger & Laila al-Zwaini, eds, Legal Pluralism in the Arab World (Leiden: Brill, 1999) 29 at 31.

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this requires transdisciplinary study and, if we’re intellectually honest, collaboration with those who aren’t legal academics. This is the promised ‘new rapprochement’ between comparatists and socio-legal jurists that Annelise Riles, Roger Cotterrell and others have suggested.7 Why is this important for legal education and the legal professionals – especially practitioners – they create? The benefits of understanding hybridity – or polyjurality – are more or less practical. It is especially practical where a lawyer has to process, in their professional activities, laws and norms from beyond her domestic legal system. It is also practical, though more difficult to quantify, in producing a lawyer able to think creatively beyond the limits of her domestic legal system. For example, in discussing the benefits of comparative law, Cotterrell has suggested that it might permit us: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9.

to find ideas useful in improving or clarifying one’s own legal system … ; to aid detailed communication between lawyers of different systems … ; to explain legal development in particular systems by tracing lines of legal borrowing and influence … ; to harmonize or unify areas of law on a transnational basis … ; to provide legal solutions to causes of international conflicts and so promote international understanding … ; to give law students and legal scholars a more distanced view of their own system …, challenging the sense of naturalness and inevitability of its particular legal arrangements … and promoting appreciation of difference … ; to understand the power of legal cultures … ; to find a common trunk of legal ideas to express the awakening of an international legal consciousness … ; or to contribute towards knowledge of the social world through study of its legal aspects.8

At the core of these various virtues is the lesson of complexity, of difference and otherness. Echoing Cotterrell, the Finnish comparatist Jaakko Husa has noted how comparative law could assist in generating a ‘pluralistic legal mind’.9 Legal education has, he argued, ‘epistemic’ qualities that suggest the naturalness of the structures and rules of the domestic system.10 Inserting legal complexity into the curriculum can, by a productive disorientation, constructively challenge students to see beyond cultural, perhaps ephemeral, limitations.11 Where the traditions encountered are also explicitly part of the domestic legal system, the benefits are still greater. This is also deeply strengthened when the comparisons are not merely spatial, but are explicitly temporal as well. Indeed, it is difficult to separate these two dimensions. With this in mind, histories of hybridity, drawing on the methods of modern legal and social sciences, would show just how complex our own past has been. These could serve an especially useful critical function. They undermine, for example, the anachronistic application of modern legal nationalism and positivism, legal centralism and unity, into the past. They remind us that the state has been historically, and in much of the world remains, only the most obvious and formalized creator of norms. They challenge ideas of deep correspondence between laws and societies and the division of multifarious traditions into reasonably discrete,

 7 Annelise Riles, “Comparative Law and Socio-Legal Studies” in Mathias Reimann & Reinhard Zimmermann, eds, The Oxford Handbook of Comparative Law (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006) 775 at 777. See also ibid. at 805–6; Roger Cotterrell, Law, Culture and Society: Legal Ideas in the Mirror of Social Theory (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2006).  8 Cotterrell, ibid. at 130. Cotterrell has suggested something similar for jurisprudence in “Pandora’s Box: Jurisprudence in Legal Education” (2000) 7 International Journal of the Legal Profession 179 at 183.  9 Jaakko Husa, “Turning the Curriculum Upside Down: Comparative Law as an Educational Tool for Constructing Pluralistic Legal Mind [sic]” (2009) 10 German Law Journal 913. See also Michael P Waxman, “The Comparative Legal Process throughout the Law School Curriculum: A Modest Proposal for Culture and Competence in a Pluralistic Society” (1990–91) 74 Marq L Rev 391. 10 Husa, supra note 9 at 915. 11 See António Manuel Hespanha, “Legal History and Legal Education” (2004) 4 Rechtsgeschichte 41 at 45 [Hespanha, “Legal History”].

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closed legal systems or families. The plural Western past can also tell us much about the global present. In doing so, histories of hybridity may prepare us for the future and new – or are they old? – possibilities.12 These sorts of lessons are important to the question of stateless law and its teaching. Students need some understanding of the inherent normativity of human community and its distinctive institutionalized forms. They specifically need to know that the state – especially the centralized state of modern state legal systems – has a history, including a complex birth and eventful life; rumours of its death are probably exaggerated. The state isn’t, and never has been, the only source of laws, much less of norms. Students must become alert to the limitations of positivism, legal centralism and monism. They must know a bit about religion and politics, about church and state. They must see temporal changes to cultural and even linguistic complexities, e.g., ius and lex. They should know how social customs developed and how elites transform these into legal customs. And students should become aware of the different ways in which the individual can be characterized or, indeed, ignored. In short, comparative legal/normative history can provide all of the lessons of hybridity that other approaches – legal philosophy, the humanities, the social sciences, etc. – can. But legal history might also be more attractive than these other approaches and consequently more likely to succeed in our aims. António Manuel Hespanha wrote, for example, that alerting students to complexity could be: assumed by … the sociology of law or legal anthropology, or even a certain understanding of jurisprudence or legal theory. However, academic conservatism in many law schools offers a sensible resistance to the integration of these studies in curriculum programs, fearing that these novelties could endanger the implicit apologetic characteristic of prevailing legal education. … This is the reason why … legal history – a traditional and longestablished item of legal education – can fulfill the role that these ‘spurious’ novel disciplines should play.13

These comments are still stronger when extended to comparative legal and normative histories. They can be a valuable vehicle with which to spread the gospel of hybridity. B. Trans-temporal Transnational Law For many, the meaning of comparative legal history, much less comparative legal/normative history, isn’t selfevident. One definition of the former, used by Matthias Reimann and Alain Levasseur, suggests that it is the description and comparison of ‘the historical development of different legal traditions’ resulting in ‘draw[ing] conclusions from the observed similarities and differences to enhance our understanding of the respective systems’.14 Of course, this isn’t the only way to understand the subject. Borrowing from work on historiography, we can understand such comparative work to be a focus on entangled histories.15 That is, we shouldn’t adopt a sort of historical functionalism, but investigate the manner in which different corpora and fora interpenetrate one another. Indeed, because single traditions – if that phrase makes any sense – are also inherently plural, comparative and entangled histories of particular places and limited jurisdictions are also important. 12 See Seán Patrick Donlan, “Histories of Hybridity: A Problem, a Primer, a Plea and a Plan (of Sorts)” in Eleanor Cashin Ritaine, Seán Patrick Donlan & Martin Sychold, eds, Comparative Law and Hybrid Legal Traditions: Lausanne, 10–11 September 2009 (Zurich: Schulthess, 2010) 21. See also ibid. at 34 (‘[t]hings have, after all, been different; they will be again’). C.f. Dirk Heirbaut’s ‘integral legal history’ in “Reading Past Legal Text – A Tale of Two Histories: Some Personal Reflections on the Methodology of Legal History” in Dag Michalsen, ed, Reading Past Legal Texts (Oslo: Akademisk Publisering, 2006) 91. 13 Hespanha, “Legal History”, supra note 11 at 41. For an example of this complexity, see António Manuel Hespanha, “Early Modern Law and the Anthropological Imagination of Old European Legal Culture” in John A Marino, ed, Early Modern History and the Social Sciences: Testing the Limits of Braudel’s Mediterranean (Kirksville, Mo: Truman State University Press) 191. See also Jim Phillips, “Why Legal History Matters” (2010) 41 VUWLR 293 at 294–5. 14 Mathias Reimann & Alain Levasseur, “Comparative Legal and Legal History in the United States” (1998) 46 Am J Comp L 1 at 13. See also Andrew Lewis, “On Not Expecting the Spanish Inquisition: The Uses of Comparative Legal History” (2004) 57 Curr Legal Probs 53. 15 See Eliga H Gould, “Entangled Histories, Entangled Worlds: The English-Speaking Atlantic as a Spanish Periphery” (2007) 112 American Historical Review 764 at 766, citing Jürgen Kocka, “Comparison and Beyond” (2003) 42 History and Theory 39. See Gould’s footnotes on related historiographical approaches and see also Deborah Cohen & Maura O’Conner, eds, Comparison and History: Europe in Cross-National Perspective (Oxon: Routledge, 2004).

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For example, English law was always part of a wider European jurisprudential-juridical legal culture. Over centuries, its jurists were in constant communication with, and selectively incorporated significant elements of, continental law. But the English common law also competed with its own iura propria, its local and lesser jurisdictions, as well as other normative traditions. All were essential to modern – and plural – AngloAmerican legal traditions. And a wide variety of legal sources or authorities, including many from beyond the law, were persuasive in legislation and adjudication. The common law (properly understood) only achieved its hegemony over the course of centuries by borrowing from and absorbing its rival jurisdictions, both foreign and domestic.16 As this indicates, our legal and normative histories are intertwined. Law and non-law are not easily divided.17 While comparative legal history is already ‘exceedingly difficult to do’, we have to do more.18 Of course, legal history and comparative law are also ‘two sides of the same coin’.19 There’s simply no sharp distinction between them.20 This is true both because they are important to one another and because each is inherently comparative, the one in time, the other in space. As Michele Graziadei has written, of contemporary Europe: the study of the past need not be the study of how we were or, even worse, of how we shall be. It can be the study of how different they – our ancestors, if you like – were from us. The step in this direction – towards the study of the past as another country – entails the same exit and return to the familiar landscape of contemporary law that comparativists experience when they approach contemporary foreign legal systems. The awareness of this common experience may provide a firmer ground for our discussions, and open up new fields of research.21

But the different disciplinary perspectives of comparatists and legal historians can distort this lesson. James Gordley notes: The mistake for legal historians is to assume that the law of a given time and place develops in its own way which can be studied without regard to how the law is developed elsewhere. The corresponding mistake for comparative lawyers is to assume that the law of each modern jurisdiction forms a coherent system rather than an amalgam of solutions developed over time.22

16 Seán Patrick Donlan, “‘All This Together Make Up Our Common Law’: Legal Hybridity in England and Ireland, 1704–1804” in Esin Örücü, ed, Mixed Legal Systems at New Frontiers (London: Wildy, Simmonds & Hill, 2010). That paper was developed out of “‘Our Laws Are as Mixed as Our Language’: Commentaries on the Laws of England and Ireland, 1704–1804”, originally delivered at the Second World Congress of the World Society of Mixed Jurisdiction Jurists, and published in (2008) 3 Journal of Comparative Law 178 and (2008) 12:1 EJCL. 17 On ‘non-law’ and ‘the ways in which potential disputes are resolved without recourse to formal legal mechanisms’, see David Ibbettson, “Comparative Legal History: A Methodology” in Anthony Musson & Chantal Stebbings, eds, Making Legal History: Approaches and Methodologies (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2012) 131 at 142. 18 Reimann & Levasseur, supra note 14 at 14. 19 Jan Lokin, “Legal History and Comparative Law, A Pair of Bifocals” (2006) 8 Eur J L Ref 13 at 27. See also Gert Steenhoff, “The Place of Legal History in the Teaching of Law and in Comparatists [sic] Formation” in EH Hondius, ed, Netherlands Reports to the Fifteenth International Congress of Comparative Law: Bristol 1998 (Antwerp: Intersentia, 1998) 1 at 6; Eltjo Schrage & Viola Heutger, “Legal History and Comparative Law” in Jan M Smits, ed, Elgar Encyclopedia of Comparative Law (Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar, 2006) 405. 20 ‘[T]he comparative approach constitutes a necessary – not just an optional – requirement to deal with legal history’: Aniceto Masferrer, “Spanish Legal History: A Need for Its Comparative Approach” in Kjell Å Modéer & Per Nilsén, eds, How to Teach European Comparative Legal History: Workshop at the Faculty of Law, Lund University, August 19–20, 2009 (Lund: Juristförlaget i Lund, 2010) 107 at 123. 21 Michele Graziadei, “Comparative Law, Legal History and the Holistic Approach to Legal Cultures’ (1999) Z Eu P 530 at 531. This observation is closely linked with Graziadei’s fundamentally historical view that comparative law may be thought of ‘as the study of transplants and receptions’. Michele Graziadei, “Comparative Law as the Study of Transplants and Receptions” in Mathias Reimann & Reinhard Zimmermann, eds, The Oxford Handbook of Comparative Law (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006) 441. 22 James Gordley, “Comparative Law and Legal History” in Mathias Reimann & Reinhard Zimmermann, eds, The Oxford Handbook of Comparative Law (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006) 753 at 763. C.f. Ariela J Gross, “Race, Law, and Comparative History” (2011) 29 LHR 549 at 552.

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Comparative law and legal history are themselves joined at the most fundamental level. Both provide information that is essential to an understanding of the concept of law itself. A decade ago, McGill’s Roderick Macdonald wrote:

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Legal anthropologists have well excavated the terrain of competing legalities. To date, however, legal pluralism has tended to focus on the exotic … or the pathological … Only slowly is the historical pedigree of legal pluralism being rediscovered; only slowly is the age of the new being appreciated. So, in exploring legal pluralism as a so-called paradigm shift, one is not engaged in any polemical post-modern project; one is, rather, remembering as much as constructing.23

I’ve argued that ‘remembering’ this past better prepares Western jurists to understand and address the pluralism of the present, not least within mixed traditions.24 Simplifying significantly, Western legal history since the fall of Rome was a movement from ius (a sense of rightness, closely associated to the meaning of norm, often with respect to social mores) to lex (the posited rule of an authority), though the latter is often created to ensure the former and has frequently operated behind the veil of custom and redaction. With this change, a sort of cultural amnesia gradually set in. Such forgetfulness is all too common within legal academia and in each of the major Western traditions. Both the Anglo-American and continental legal traditions acknowledge some minor diversity, but their respective focuses on common laws – whether the romano-canonical ius commune or the jurisprudence of the English courts of common law – significantly distort our legal and normative past. Restricting myself to the period after the fall of the Roman Empire, there were, throughout Europe, multiple contemporaneous normative and legal regimes co-existing and overlapping in the same geographical space and at the same time, though often affecting different individuals. If laws and norms could be blurred, we must not ignore differences and collapse them into one category without distinction. As Thomas Kuehn, in a work on Renaissance Florence, wrote: Certainly the boundary between the legal and nonlegal is not always clear, nor is it impermeable and unchanging. The law never operates in isolation. To litigants it is a means – one among others – and not an end. So they may also refuse to abide by a decision imposed on them (rather than one worked out with their participation). But it is also not possible to reduce the distance between law and the nonlegal. In the cases we have seen that distance was marked by the intervention of judges, notaries, and a jurist; by the purchase and formulation of documents; by reference to norms articulated in jurisprudential writings and communal statutes in Latin; by costs and delays. To label both episodes simply as disputes is to elide major differences in tone, manner, and content. It is especially to undervalue the disputants’ own appreciation of the special status and form of law as a category of norms and dispute intervention.25

European laws included multifarious folk-laws, local and particular iura propria, the romano-canonical learned laws and other trans-territorial iura communia (including feudal law and perhaps the lex mercatoria). To these must also be added numerous summary and discretionary jurisdictions of low justice, arbitration of different sorts, the internal jurisdiction of non-state corporate bodies like guilds and a wide variety of other alternative methods of dispute resolution. These arguably affected more people more of the time than did royal or common laws. Normative and legal ordering was multicentric, with disparate competing centres of power and persuasion. Legal regimes only rarely sought, and still less often expected, to govern their rivals. The ability to legislate or adjudicate authoritatively was contested for centuries. One searches in vain for a Grundnorm, though practicalities could determine the dominance of different institutions at different times 23 Roderick A Macdonald, “Metaphors of Multiplicity: Civil Society, Regimes and Legal Pluralism” (1998) 15 Ariz J Int’l & Comp L 69 at 75–6 [emphasis added]. 24 Seán Patrick Donlan, “Remembering: Legal Hybridity and Legal History” (2011) 2 Comparative Law Review 1. See also Werner Menski, “Beyond Europe” in Esin Örücü & David Nelken, eds, Comparative Law: A Handbook (Oxford: Hart, 2007) 189 at 198, citing William Twining, Globalisation and Legal theory (Evanston, Ill: Northwestern University Press, 2000) and H Patrick Glenn, On Common Laws (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). 25 Thomas Kuehn, Law, Family, & Women: Toward a Legal Anthropology of Renaissance Italy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991) at 100.

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and different places. And these varieties of legality took plural forms that were everywhere in communication with less institutionalized normative orders. Indeed, a spectrum of more-or-less institutionalized normative forms can be seen across our history. Social norms may be rationalized through language to general principles or more specific rules. These are further instantiated in tradition, from a large variety of implicit and non-institutionalized normative practices and orders (an interrelated assemblage of norms) to ever-more institutionalized forms. While a bright-line can’t be established, the creation of a normative regime can be seen as the inclusion of a minimal level of specialization – perhaps largely in personnel – in norm creation (whether conscious or inadvertent) and/or decision-making, whatever its content. The significant further shift to a legal regime, to recognition as law, involved additional specialization in personnel, training and language, assisted by the introduction of writing and archives permitting an institutional memory of authorized or authentic norms to be maintained over time and space. When they finally develop late in Western history, states are still more formally institutionalized. State legal regimes make the novel claim to sovereign dominance or exclusivity. Other normative orders and regimes were seen, at least in increasingly important theories of state sovereignty, as reliant on the sufferance of the state. Finally, the modern Western legal systems of the nineteenth century make these claims meaningful while also threading together the diverse legal regimes into a single common law, though still without displacing its rivals. Earlier ideas and institutions might, of course, continue to exist within reformed structures. Equity, in the sense of the English Courts of Chancery, continues to have a subterranean existence in English law although all of that law is now referred to by the historically inappropriate label common law, which had been the laws of the courts of common law, excluding Equity, ecclesiastical law, manorial law, etc. This modern world of state legal systems persists and remains dominant, at least in legal terms, though the developments described by other contributors to this collection have begun to challenge the hegemony of state laws. III. Spreading the Gospel A. Polyjurality and Pedagogy Ideally, polyjurality would saturate the teaching of law in an organic and holistic manner. This is most likely to produce students alert to the complexity of law and norms and better equipped as practitioners, even if they were never to leave their own jurisdiction. Where such an approach, broadly understood, has been formally taken, the specific approaches adopted are explained by distinctive contexts. The School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) of the University of London (UK), for example, was founded nearly a century ago to train British imperial administrators for the colonies. Its programmes have sought to make its students – in the humanities, law and the social sciences – aware of the cultures of Africa, Asia and the Middle East. In Werner Menski’s Comparative Law in a Global Context, he wrote that SOAS – from which he’s only recently retired – had, since 1975, required its students ‘to read and think comparatively and theoretically about the phenomenon of law on a worldwide level’.26 This remains true. Its ethos and the expertise of its faculty members make awareness of the complexity of laws and norms, including stateless law, more likely. But the requirement is actually quite modest, amounting only to Legal Systems of Asia and Africa in the first year, though numerous upper-level elective modules exist as well.27 In addition, the SOAS LL.B. is, as with most primary law degrees across Europe, an undergraduate degree. Its young students haven’t had the background that North American law students have, for better or worse. The European Law School of Maastricht University (the Netherlands) is somewhat more systematic, though more geographically limited. Its supra-systemic programme combines Anglo-American and continental law, either in English or in English and Dutch and usually with reference to the law of significant member states of the European Union (EU), i.e., France, Germany and the United Kingdom (especially

26 Werner Menski, Comparative Law in a Global Context: The Legal Systems of Asia and Africa, 2d ed (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2006) at 75 (outlining ‘[a] model of pluralist, globally-conscious legal education’ at 75). 27 E.g. Chinese Law, Islamic Law, Law and Society in Africa, Law and Society in South Asia, etc.

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England). Dutch law is also included.28 Importantly, these are integrated across the curriculum. Indeed, even European legal history is required in Maastricht. They claim, too, to ‘aim at integrating legal history into the various (modern) law courses on offer’.29 And Educating European Lawyers, a recent collection published by members of the Maastricht faculty, suggests the creation of ‘European law schools’ like their own. These would offer an undergraduate degree that combined three years of supra-systemic legal study followed by a year or two focused on a specific domestic system.30 Like the Maastricht programme and consistent with the positivistic leanings of European – including English – lawyers, this approach focuses on laws rather than norms.31 That is, while European law students are made aware of the importance of Europe’s transnational laws, both past and present, there is little necessary engagement with (i) international laws and norms or (ii) norms beyond the laws.32 In a manner broadly similar to the Maastricht programme, the Hanse Law School is a joint programme in European and Comparative Law with the Universities of Bremen and Oldenburg (both in Germany) and Groningen University (the Netherlands). Primarily rooted in Germany, students also study abroad, especially with their Dutch partner. Taught partly in English, the programme seeks to ensure that a student receives an education in German, Dutch and English law. Students are also required to take classes in political science and, for better or worse, economics. Unfortunately, the programme doesn’t formally prepare a student for the German Bar, a serious problem for students considering their professional future, especially in difficult economic times.33 Of course, law schools throughout the EU have been required to reconsider the role of state law in a sui generis, supra-state entity that regulates much of the lives of its members and citizens through binding transnational laws.34 Indeed, this is also true for the signatories of the European Convention on Human Rights as the European Court of Human Rights that protects the convention. These European laws are understood to be essential, if not central, to us. My own law school in Ireland, for example, mandates the teaching of EU law, but this is almost a necessary evil rather than a defining aspect of the education we provide.35 But in addition to the necessary engagement with what is, at least, a complex positivism, the traditional importance 28 Sjef van Erp, “Teaching Law in Europe: From an Intra-Systemic, via a Trans-Systemic to a Supra-Systemic Approach” in Aalt Willem Heringa & Bram Akkermans, eds, Educating European Lawyers (Antwerp: Intersentia, 2011) 79. 29 CH van Rhee & JAJM van der Meer, “Teaching European Legal History at Maastricht University in the Netherlands” in Kjell Å Modéer & Per Nilsén, How to Teach European Comparative Legal History: Workshop at the Faculty of Law, Lund University, August 19–20 2009 (Lund: Juristförlaget i Lund, 2010) 143 at 143. Frankly, the integration of legal history – presumably by non-historians – is a little worrying. 30 Aalt Willem Heringa, “Towards a Truly European Legal Education: An Agenda for the Future” in Aalt Willem Heringa & Bram Akkermans, eds, Educating European Lawyers (Antwerp: Intersentia, 2011) 3. See also Bram Akkermans & Aalt Willem Heringa, “Conclusion: Towards a Coalition for European Legal Education (CELE)” in Aalt Willem Heringa & Bram Akkermans, eds, Educating European Lawyers (Antwerp: Intersentia, 2011). 31 On England, see (the slightly dated) PS Atiyah & RS Summers, Form and Substance in Anglo-American Law (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987). For Europe more generally, see Martijn W Hesselink, The New European Legal Culture (Deventer, Netherlands: Kluwer, 2001); Martijn W Hesselink, “The New European Legal Culture – Ten Years On” (7 December 2009), online: Social Science Research Network . 32 Indeed, ‘transnational’ is often understood in a largely instrumental manner and need not provide any deeper lessons. C.f. Peer Zumbansen, “Transnational Legal Pluralism” (2010) 1 Transnational Legal Theory 141; Craig Scott, “‘Transnational Law’ as Proto-Concept: Three Conceptions” (2009) 10 German Law Journal 859. 33 Franziska Weber, “‘Hanse Law School’ – A Promising Example of Transnational Legal Education? An Alumna’s Perspective” (2009) 10 German Law Journal 969. 34 See Bénédicte Fauvarque-Cosson, The Rise of Comparative Law: A Challenge for Legal Education in Europe (Groningen, Netherlands: Europa Law Publishing, 2007); Jan M Smits, “European Legal Education, or: How to Prepare Students for Global Citizenship?” (2011) 45 The Law Teacher 163. (The latter also appears in Aalt Willem Heringa & Bram Akkermans, eds, Educating European Lawyers (Antwerp: Intersentia, 2011) 38. 35 Indeed, there is little comparative law in Ireland, either South (the Republic of Ireland) or North (Northern Ireland); the same is true of law and humanities and the social sciences. But there is, I suggest, a hunger for comparative, European and international law. Consistent again with my second theme, the establishment of the Irish Society of Comparative Law in 2009 (online: ) has led to four annual conferences with 50–60 speakers each year. With less than a half-dozen self-styled comparatists across the island – it’s a North/South body – this is impressive.

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of doctrine (i.e., legal scholarship) on the continent has led, along with practical political developments, to a complex dialogue on the generation of a novum ius commune Europaneum (literally, a new common law of Europe) and its importance to its positive laws.36 At the practical level, too, the EU’s Erasmus programme has made it easy for students in the member states to study in other member states for short periods. Along with its deeper purposes of making Europeans more aware of the cultures of their fellow citizens, the programme has done much to foster a more complex education both within law and beyond. The Transsystemic Program of the Faculty of Law at McGill University (Canada) goes further than SOAS, Maastricht or the Hanse Law School. The programme has received considerable, mostly positive, attention in its first decade.37 It might be best described as primarily focusing on those Western legal traditions – the AngloAmerican and continental – that make up the core of the state law of the province of Quebec, though in light of Canadian federal laws.38 Indeed, the categorization of the classes reflects this. The laws of the First Nations, enshrined in Canada’s constitutional texts, are also increasingly important. This transsystemic approach is not merely sequential, but integrated within single classes. But the Faculty, or at least a significant number of the Faculty, support a still-wider focus on non-state laws and norms. This broad sense of polyjurality is most clearly addressed in its Foundations of Law class. A few years ago, Roderick Macdonald and Jason MacLean wrote that its aims involve[d], first, approaches to law – the development of the curriculum from a focus on a single state legal system (unijuralism), to consideration of both civil law and common law traditions (bijuralism), and ultimately to an open-ended exploration of multiple sites of legal normativity (plurijuralism). They also involve the development of a curriculum taught initially in one language, to a bilingual pedagogy, to an open-ended exploration of multiple forms of human communication. Finally, these aspirations involve the move from a single disciplinary focus, to interdisciplinary studies, to a transdisciplinary orientation.39

The McGill programme is far more comprehensive than the SOAS curriculum. Unlike Maastricht and the Hanse Law School, McGill’s approach also stretches beyond positive laws to social norms and legal pluralism.40 And this study of polyjurality – as defined there – is an inherently inter- or transdisciplinary study. As Harry Arthurs put it, McGill seeks ‘to problematize the very notion of law itself’ and to contribute to ‘the challenge of thinking about legal education “without the state”’.41 In this sense, it might be said that McGill’s transsystemic approach doesn’t merely cross traditions, but, at its best, transcends them.

36 See e.g. Jan Smits, The Making of European Private Law: Toward a Ius Commune Europaeum as a Mixed Legal System, translated by N Kornet (Antwerp: Intersentia, 2002). See also Reinhard Zimmermann, “Savigny’s Legacy: Legal History, Comparative Law, and the Emergence of a European Legal Science” (1996) 112 Law Q Rev 576. 37 See e.g. Yves-Marie Morissette, “McGill’s Integrated Civil and Common Law Program” (2002) 52 J Legal Educ 12 and additional titles collected at “Selected Scholarly Writing about Transsystemic Legal Education”, online: Paul-André Crépeau Centre for Private and Comparative Law, Faculty of Law, McGill University . See also Nicholas Kasirer, “Bijuralism in Law’s Empire and in Law’s Cosmos” (2002) 52 J Legal Educ 29. 38 The law schools of many federal and small jurisdictions, where international or transnational laws are of especial importance, also handle legal hybridity as a matter of course. This is also true, of course, in mixed legal traditions like Louisiana. See John J Costonis, “The Louisiana State University Law Center’s Bijural Program” (2002) 52 J Legal Educ 4. With the exception of a historical introduction to Louisiana’s mixed legal tradition, no transsystemic module is currently taught at LSU. The reform that Costonis discussed was not, to my knowledge, ever implemented. 39 Supra note 1 at 727. Ten years ago, Harry Arthurs criticized McGill for a lack of interdisciplinarity, ‘the love that – unlike jurality – dared not speak its name’ in “Madly Off in One Direction: McGill’s New Integrated, Polyjural, Transsystemic Law Programme” (2005) 50 McGill LJ 707 at 715. He saw the focus on jurality as a focus on the law of the state. C.f. Roderick A Macdonald & Kate Glover, “Implicit Comparative Law” (2013) 43:1–2 RDUS 123. 40 Arthurs, a champion of legal pluralism himself, noted that ‘[l]egal pluralism might help to bridge the gap between interdisciplinarity and jurality’ (supra note 39 at 718). 41 Harry W Arthurs, “Law and Learning in an Era of Globalization” (2009) 10 German Law Journal 629 at 637 [Arthurs, “Law and Learning”]. This last comment alludes to Arthurs’s ‘Without the Law’: Administrative Justice and Legal Pluralism in Nineteenth-Century England (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1985). See also Arthurs, “‘Without the Law’: Courts of Local and Special Jurisdiction in Nineteenth-Century England” (1994) 5 J Legal Hist 130.

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In the United States, where the law schools are generally no less insular than the wider culture, there have been a few exciting developments.42 The New York University (NYU) School of Law initiated its Global Law School programme in the mid-1990s. Discussing it in 1996, John Edward Sexton, then Dean of the School of Law, wrote: The program consists of three initiatives. The first, the Global Faculty Program, will add to the school’s faculty up to twenty law professors from around the world. The second, the Hauser Global Scholars Program, will provide up to twenty full scholarships each year for graduate law students from countries throughout the world. And the third, the Engelberg Center on Property and Innovation in a Global Economy, will underwrite research and teaching on the impact of the global economy on fundamental notions of property, ownership, and trade regulation.43

While there have inevitably been changes in the decade and a half of its existence, the programme continues largely as it began.44 It can boast a very large number of international visiting faculty, researchers and students. Where NYU has brought the world to it, the Transnational Law Program of the School of Law of Washington University in St Louis (US) has attempted, with a number of European partner institutions, to make it possible for students to put together an international legal education suitable to their interests and needs by completing their studies in different institutions. The partners include the Católica Global School of Law (Portugal), Queen’s University Belfast (UK), the University of Trento (Italy) or Utrecht University (the Netherlands). For students beginning their study in the United States, the programme awards a J.D./ LL.M.; students beginning at the other institutions will receive their primary degree there as well as an LL.M.45 It is important to note that, whatever their successes, both the NYU and Washington programmes create sites in which global or transnational learning might take place. This is not integrated in the same manner as at Maastricht or McGill. Indeed, given the variety of classes available at NYU and Washington, there is no guarantee that the substance of the legal education they provide will be meaningfully transsystemic. B. Beggars and Choosers Similar, though usually more limited, undergraduate and graduate programmes are being developed on both sides of the Atlantic. For obvious reasons, measuring the success of polyjural pedagogy is difficult.46 We can’t really know, of course, how well a lawyer has processed or thought through legal complexity beyond her domestic legal system. We might attempt to measure, as is done in practice, a law school’s production of legal scholars or the hiring of their graduates by transnational corporations. But this will only be suggestive, rooted perhaps in the pedigrees of these prestigious law schools rather than on the actual performance of the lawyers they produce. The law school rankings used in North America – the US News & World Report (US) or Macleans (Canada) – are notoriously suspect.47 Indeed, what could possibly measure the performance of legal scholars, transnational lawyers, other practitioners or even the law schools themselves? In any event, surely the impact of these programmes is at least as great as any other liberal education. The belief that law students benefit from any study beyond the law is, for example, at the heart of the graduate study of law throughout 42 See Alan Watson, The Shame of American Legal Education (Lake Mary, Fla: Vandeplas Publishing, 2007) [Watson, Shame]. C.f. the more philosophical critique of Robert A Pascal, “A Summary Reflection on Legal Education” (2008–09) 69 La L Rev 125. 43 John Edward Sexton, “Global Law School Program at New York University” (1996) 46 J Legal Educ 329 at 331. 44 Norman Dorsen, “Achieving International Cooperation: NYU’s Global Law School Program” (2001) 51 J Legal Educ 332. But see Catherine Valke, “Global Law Teaching” (2004) 54 J Legal Educ 160. 45 Another Canadian approach is York University’s Osgoode Hall Law School’s International, Comparative and Transnational Law Program. See Craig Scott, “A Core Curriculum for the Transnational Legal Education of JD and LLB students: Surveying the Approach of the International, Comparative and Transnational Law Program at Osgoode Hall Law School” (2004–05) 23 Penn State International Law Review 757. 46 See Helge Dedek & Armand de Mestral, “Born to Be Wild: The ‘Trans-systemic’ Programme at McGill and the De-Nationalization of Legal Education” (2009) 10 German Law Journal 889 at 909–10. 47 See e.g. Brian Z Tamanaha, Failing Law Schools (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012).

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most of North America. More specifically, within the legal education offered by a specific legal programme, a similar argument maintains that a student’s grasp of the complexity of social regulation, and the ways in which we’ve thought about this regulation, might make them a more creative advocate, adjudicator, lawmaker or scholar.48 Classes on jurisprudence, or perhaps comparative law, social science, etc., are meant to provide this, though generally only as electives.49 Indeed, the truth is that these subjects are seen by the vast majority of law schools as peripheral. They instead see their mission as producing competent practitioners or having high bar passage rates. This shouldn’t be misunderstood. The programmes discussed here are important developments. McGill’s programme, for example, is a significant accomplishment. But neither the transsystemic approach nor those of the other programmes mentioned here can reasonably be seen as a ‘New Langdellian Moment’, bound to sweep across the law schools as Christopher Columbus Landgell’s approach did in the United States in the late nineteenth century.50 For many faculties and students, perhaps especially those in Anglophone (and Anglocentric) jurisdictions, a trans- or multisystemic approach is likely to generate little enthusiasm and support. This is even more true for stateless law. Perhaps these approaches are attractive and appropriate for a limited number of elite institutions, but the approach is neither desirable to, nor, in all honesty, necessary for most lawyers. Indeed, for most law faculties, even classes like comparative law and legal history are at the periphery. Many modern lawyers, both in practice and in academia, don’t see the importance of these subjects in their professional lives. A decade or so ago, writing about the American context, Mary Ann Glendon wrote that ‘an interest in other legal systems is something like an interest in wines; a little knowledge about them is a sign of good taste and sophistication, but a serious dedication may be evidence of waste, or luxury, or even worse’.51 While the subject is more important in Europe, my experience is that interest in and knowledge of comparative law is still often quite superficial, beyond the bare necessities of understanding EU laws and institutions. And ‘[l]egal historians’, it has been said, ‘are still often asked to justify including legal history in the curriculum’.52 Viewed as still more exotic or esoteric, the complexities of legal and especially normative hybridity receive even less attention. When it does, it is not deeply woven into the law curriculum as at McGill. These classes are best seen as, to use a Louisiana phrase (bastardized from Spanish), lagniappe, meaning a gratuitous extra (like a lollipop given to a child after a doctor’s visit). Comparative law and the like are merely a bonus to the real work of the core, bar classes.53 Especially in the United States, where students pay significant fees even at public institutions, law schools are more often viewed as trade schools than sites of liberal education. Anita Bernstein has recently written on the addition of transnational law to law school curriculum. She unfavourably compared piecemeal, add-on lagniappe reforms to that of a ‘Heartier Meal’ of more substantial change.54 ‘The key differences’, she wrote, ‘between a genuine introduction of transnational materials into the law school curriculum and the skimpy alternative of a lagniappe is this awareness, which originates in self-conscious policy: a plan, observation, assessment, response’.55 This is true, but the hope for a ‘genuine introduction of transnational materials’, much less polyjural materials, is impractical for most law schools. Indeed, while there are important exceptions, even this lagniappe – in the form of comparative law, legal history, transnational law, 48 See e.g. Vivian Groswald Curran, “Dealing in Difference: Comparative Law’s Potential for Broadening Legal Perspectives” (1998) 46 Am J Comp L 657. 49 This sentiment is occasionally backed by the demands of professional bodies as well. In Ireland, for example, jurisprudence is required for those wishing to enter King’s Inns to become a barrister. 50 Peter L Strauss, “Transsystemia – Are We Approaching a New Langdellian Moment? – Is McGill Leading the Way?” (2005–06) 24 Penn State International Law Review 763. 51 Mary Ann Glendon, “Why Cross Boundaries?” (1996) 53 Wash & Lee L Rev 971 at 972. See also Ugo Mattei, “Some Realism about Comparativism: Comparative Law Teaching in the Hegemonic Jurisdiction” (2002) 50 Am J Comp L 87 at 89. 52 Michael H Hoeflich, “A Renaissance in Legal History?” (1984) U Ill L Rev 507 at 508. But c.f. Christopher Tomlins, “Review Essay – The Consumption of History in the Legal Academy: Science and Synthesis, Perils and Prospects” (2011–12) 61 J Legal Educ 139. 53 This is the pejorative sense in which it is used in Anita Bernstein, “On Nourishing the Curriculum with a Transnational Law Lagniappe” (2006) 56 J Legal Educ 578. 54 Ibid. at 590. 55 Ibid. at 594–95. Further, ‘[t]o repair its provincialism, or remedy any other gap, the law school curriculum needs better nourishment than “the thirteenth roll of a baker’s dozen”’ (ibid. at 595).

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etc. – is often neglected.56 At many universities, such classes provide mere colour to the wider legal curriculum. They are too seldom obligatory. If this is true, surely this half-a-loaf lagniappe is better than none. Comparative legal/normative history – inherently transsystemic, transtemporal and transnational – is one way to teach the lessons of hybridity. But there are difficulties with such an approach. First, the legal historian must attempt some reasonable level of distance. History must be studied closely and weighted carefully, insofar as is possible, according to reliable standards of historiography. Lawyers are often very poor historians. They typically lack professional training in the subject and their interest in history is often driven by other agendas. In addition, to achieve the goals suggested here, a merely national history or a mere history of common laws is insufficient. Likewise, an internal, doctrinal legal history will be too shallow, though legal history shouldn’t ignore what lawyers are saying about themselves and what they do. But internal histories miss too much context. They mischaracterize the blurry boundaries between laws and norms as bright-lines.57 And even an external history that seeks a wider context might require knowledge of disciplines – like the social sciences – that have developed useful methods and created useful models for understanding normativity, institutional or otherwise.58 This is all damned difficult. Lawyers are notorious – if reasonably capable – dilettantes, but legal/ normative history is no less a specialization than any other. A non-specialist is unlikely to be able to teach the subject adequately. Perhaps a specialist on, for example, Contracts or Obligations could, with enough care if not professional training, become a fine internal historian of the field. With much greater effort, they might master external history as well. But this is no easy task. ‘There are … dangers in scholars from disciplines other than history merely “dabbling” in historical work. Lawyers in particular need to heed this advice’.59 The canned histories provided by non-experts are as likely to perpetuate myth as provide enlightenment.60 Perhaps for each or all of these reasons, the teaching of genuine comparative legal history – much less normative history – is quite rare.61 Fifteen years ago, the American legal historian Charles Donahue wrote that ‘comparative legal history hardly exists any place in the western world today’.62 There have, in fact, been some proposals to move either legal history or comparative law from the periphery to the core of legal education.63 K.J.M. Smith and J.P.S. McLaren have suggested: It might reasonably be claimed that legal history promises rich educative rewards in at least two distinctive directions: (i) as an element in a broad liberal education; and (ii) as a discrete discipline capable of enhancing legal education generally.64 56 Mathias W Reimann, “Making Transnational Law Mandatory: Requirements, Costs, Benefits” (2004–05) 23 Penn State International Law Review 787. C.f. Michael P Waxman, “Teaching Comparative Law in the 21st Century: Beyond the Civil/Common Law Dichotomy” (2001) 51 J Legal Educ 305. 57 RM Jarvis, PG Coleman & GL Richmond, “Contextual Thinking: Why Law Students (and Lawyers) Need to Know History” (1995–06) 42 Wayne L Rev 1603. 58 A recent example is P Dresch & H Skoda, eds, Legalism: Anthropology and History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). 59 J McLaren, “The Legal Historian: Masochist or Missionary? A Canadian’s Reflections” (1994) 5 Legal Education Review 67 at 82. 60 See e.g. John Phillip Reid, “Law and History” (1993) 27 Loy LA L Rev 193; W Wesley Pue, “In Pursuit of a Better Myth: Lawyers’ Histories and Histories of Lawyers” (1995) 33 Alta L Rev 730. 61 See e.g. Erich Genzmer, “A Civil Lawyer’s Critical View on Comparative Legal History” (1967) 15 Am J Comp L 87. 62 Ch Donahue Jr, “Comparative Legal History in North America: A Report” (1997) 65 Tijdschrift voor Rechtsgeschiedenis 1 at 1. See also Charles Donahue, “Comparative Law before the Code Napoléon” in Mathias Reimann & Reinhard Zimmermann, eds, The Oxford Handbook of Comparative Law (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006) 3; Alan Watson, “Legal Culture v Legal Tradition” in Mark van Hoecke, ed, Epistemology and Methodology in Comparative Law (Oxford: Hart, 2004) 1. 63 See e.g. Phillips, supra note 13; Geoffrey Samuel, “Comparative Law as a Core Subject” (2001) 21 LS 444. See also James Gordley, “Comparative Law and Legal Education” (2001) 75 Tul L Rev 1003. C.f. Henry Mather, “The Medieval Revival of Roman Law: Implications for Contemporary Legal Education” (2002) 41 Cath Law 323 (on comparative law, legal history and jurisprudence); Ugo Mattei, “An Opportunity Not to Be Missed: The Future of Comparative Law in the United States” (1998) 46 Am J Comp L 709 (on comparative law and social science). 64 KJM Smith & JPS McLaren, “History’s Living Legacy: An Outline of ‘Modern’ Historiography of the Common Law” (2001) 21 LS 251 at 315. The authors add, ‘[L]egal historiography has relevance to, and the ability to insinuate itself into, practically every region and crevice of legal study and scholarship’ (ibid. at 252).

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A few have specifically suggested, with Alan Watson, ‘that legal education at the University level should contain a strong element of comparative legal history’.65 This is part of his wider concerns about legal education, especially in the United States.66 Gordley proposes a ‘transtemporal transnational approach’, noting that understanding law in a single tradition requires us to ‘look beyond its boundaries, indeed, beyond one’s own time’.67 These can again be studies of entanglement, especially if targeted towards Western legal traditions. But there’s little reason to be optimistic about the prospects of comparative legal/normative history, even among the elite law schools. There are, of course, other, more indirect, ways to jump-start the teaching of (competent) comparative legal/normative history. It’s possible to act as rainmakers through our activities outside of the classroom and the university. We can proselytize. If we are enthusiastic and energetic, we can spread the gospel of polyjurality not only as educators or through published research, but through our activities outside of the classroom and the university. This is obvious, but not banal. Associational activity and the related conferences, blogs and websites, and publications that follow are extremely important in reaching much more than our own students. And this rainmaking may be necessary for those of us teaching in more provincial law schools where bar progression, rather than polyjurality, is the goal. By our words and actions beyond the classroom, we might create sacred texts, a priesthood and partisans; we might alter programmes or change minds; we might make converts. I have tried to do this, not least through my role in the establishment of the European Society for Comparative Legal History (ESCLH). The ESCLH conferences, its journal (Comparative Legal History) and a collaborative Western Legal Traditions casebook are all part of this mission.68 And, in my own work, I’ve attempted to marry the expertise of European legal historians – often doctrinal and internal, on iura communia and iura propria – to the more contextual and external focus of North American, colonial and imperial legal historians.69 Indeed, while legal history can be marginalized even in Canada, it is at the cutting edge of legal historical scholarship because of its necessary engagement with mixity and legal pluralism.70 Similarly, another project, led by me and Dirk Heirbaut (Ghent) and entitled The Laws Many Bodies, c1600–1900,71 examines legal and normative complexity or hybridity from the early modern to the modern era. It attempts to avoid the common law fallacies of both Anglo-American and continental jurists, i.e., the near exclusive focus on Anglo-American courts of common law and the learned ius commune respectively. To do so neglects much of the complexity, legal and normative, that was important to our past and that, as a consequence, remains important in our present.72 65 Alan Watson, Legal History and a Common Law for Europe: Mystery, Reality, Imagination (Stockholm: Institutet för rättshistorisk forskning, 2001) at 176. See also Reinhard Zimmermann, “Roman and Comparative Law: The European Perspective (Some Remarks Apropos a Recent Controversy)” (1995) 16 J Legal Hist 21. 66 ‘Most law professors are plumbers, but they wish to be regarded as philosophers, hence, they are poor plumbers’ (Watson, Shame, supra note 42 at 47). 67 James Gordley, “Comparative Legal Research: Its Function in the Development of Harmonized Law” (1995) Am J Comp L 555 at 555. 68 For the journal, see online: Comparative Legal History . For the Western Legal Traditions casebook, see online: ESCLH . 69 On Canada, see Philip Girard, “Who’s Afraid of Canadian Legal History?” (2007) UTLJ 727 at 728. On British and American differences, see e.g. Michael Lobban, “The Varieties of Legal History” (2012) 5 Clio@Thémis 4, online: C@T . 70 See Philip Girard & Jim Phillips, “Rethinking ‘the Nation’ in National Legal History: A Canadian Perspective” (2011) 29 LHR 607; Peter Karsten, “The CANZ Approach to Legal History” (2003) 21 LHR 615 (on the comparative and polyjural focus of many legal historians of Canada, Australia and New Zealand (CANZ)). 71 For the project description, see online: Academia.edu . C.f. Michael Brown & Seán Patrick Donlan, eds, The Law and Other Legalities of Ireland, 1689–1850 (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2011); Seán Patrick Donlan, “Entangled Up in Red, White, and Blue: Spanish West Florida and the American Territory of Orleans, 1803–1810” in T Duve, ed, Entanglements in Legal History: Conceptual Approaches (Frankfurt am Main: Max Planck Institute for European Leal History, 2014) 213. 72 Randall Lesaffer wrote, to his credit, that ‘the numerous local, regional and later national legal systems were equally real and substantial’: Randall Lesaffer, European Legal History: A Cultural and Political Perspective (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2009) at 5. But discussions of Europe’s local laws, its iura propria, make up at most 10 of the 549 pages of the work. See Seán Patrick Donlan, Book Review of European Legal History: A Cultural and Political

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So our future may be our past; comparative legal/normative history might be useful for preaching polyjurality. It might even be the most appropriate pedagogical option given its constitutive influence on our societies and our selves. Indeed, taking Harry Arthurs’s comments on McGill’s transsystemic approach out-of-context, we might say that legal history: challenges the notion that law’s logic is bounded, its values fixed, its processes ascertainable, and its outcomes predictable. [It] does not arrive … neatly encoded according to juridical family or conceptual category. Instead, legal systems and categories collide with and penetrate each other, reinforce and refute each other, in unpredictable ways. Civil or common law, religious or secular law, domestic or international law, state law or some other kind, all form part of the open-textured, complex, heterogeneous normative universe which students must learn to inhabit. Law … is therefore found not only in statute books and law reports; it is found everywhere, inscribed in private documents, embedded in custom, extruded from transactions or experienced as conventions of discourse and routines of daily life. Indeed, … by acknowledging the infinite varieties of ‘law’ … [, it] underscores the need for a ‘dialog with otherness’. It denies students the comfort of the familiar: it asks them to imagine law as if they were someone else. Even law’s connection with justice cannot be taken for granted … ; law sometimes empowers, sometimes oppresses and sometimes seems to do not much at all.73

History can provide this same panorama of polyjurality, either on its own (under whatever guise) or in conjunction with the sorts of programmes reviewed here.74

Perspective by Randall Lesaffer, (2011) 51 Am J Legal Hist 392. C.f. John W Head, Great Legal Traditions: Civil Law, Common Law, and Chinese Law in Historical and Operational Perspective (Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press, 2011). 73 Arthurs, “Law and Learning”, supra note 41 at 637–8. 74 My Comparative Legal Systems class in Limerick is, in practice, largely focused on comparative legal history. Similarly, a class on, for example, Legal History could also be comparative.

Chapter 16

The Impact of ‘Stateless Law’ on Legal Pedagogy

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Rosalie Jukier*

I. Introduction The national paradigm for understanding law has brought with it many implications for both the legal profession and legal pedagogy, resulting in the development of one of the most jurisdictionally restrictive professions and boundary-laden university disciplines. As Daniel Jutras has aptly pointed out, ‘Law … is generally taught in universities as though its only important manifestation is that of the political state in which the faculty is located’.1 The traditional model of legal education has been built around boundaries created by political geography and state normativity, and has faced even further restrictions due to its taxonomic structures and doctrinal categories. This chapter will assess developments in legal pedagogy occasioned by the move away from the national paradigm towards a more pluralistic, multisystemic, global and perhaps even ‘stateless’ concept of law and law teaching. It will draw upon the experience of teaching what is still thought of as a core, substantive private law subject – Contracts – in an integrated, transsystemic curriculum at McGill University’s Faculty of Law, and canvass the insights gained from breaking the mould of legal nationalism in the classroom. The chapter will conclude by asserting that pedagogically, much is to be offered by integrating the study of multiple legal traditions and perspectives in the classroom. Principal among these benefits is the opportunity it affords law professors to inculcate flexible thinking skills in their students. The ultimate goal of this pedagogical model is to graduate jurists who are able to think critically about the law and to deal creatively with contemporary problems of justice. II. What is ‘Stateless Law’? Before, however, one can begin to assess the impact of teaching stateless law on legal pedagogy, one must define the particular sense in which the concept of ‘stateless law’ is to be understood. After all, stateless law is not, in and of itself, a term of art, nor a term readily imbued with a particular meaning to most jurists. In fact, stateless law can be taken to refer to a variety of meanings. For some, it may invoke the image of international law which, while in part linked to states through the bilateral and multilateral treaties into which they enter, is not readily associated with the formal law of any one particular state. Further, it is often not seen as traditional state law because it lacks the ‘hierarchically-based commands backed by coercive power’.2 Others may understandably interpret ‘stateless law’ to reflect the growing number of law harmonization projects. Often termed ‘soft-law’, these uniform legal compendia, such as Unidroit, the Principles of European Contract Law or the Draft Common Frame of Reference, reflect concerted efforts by international committees or academics to recast an entire area of law in uniform and harmonized terms to reflect shared values and

* The author would like to acknowledge the outstanding research assistance of McGill law students Nicola Langille and Alain Henri Deschamps. 1 Daniel Jutras, “Two Arguments for Cross-Cultural Legal Education”, in Heinz-Dieter Assmann, Gert Brüggemeier & Rolf Sethe, eds, Different Legal Cultures: Convergence of Legal Reasoning, vol 3: Grundlagen und Schwerpunkte des Privatrechts in europäischer Perspektive (Baden-Baden: Nomos, 2001) 75 at 84 [Jutras, “Two Arguments”]. 2 Paul Schiff Berman, “Global Legal Pluralism” (2007) 80 S Cal L Rev 1155 at 1197. 1

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practices. While these are clearly important projects with many practical legal implications,3 these are termed soft-law precisely because they are non-authoritative. They may hold persuasive power, but given that they are not the enacted law of any one state, they might be classified as stateless law. Alternative dispute resolution falls into another category to which one may ascribe the term ‘stateless law’. By choosing to resolve disputes through arbitration, for example, the parties remove their problem from the confines of state institutions created for the resolution of legal disputes – the courts. Arbitrators, unlike judges, do not derive their authority from the state and have more flexibility in the ‘law’ they apply to the resolution of parties’ disputes voluntarily conferred to their authority. Arbitrators may, accordingly, be seen as applying and acting pursuant to ‘stateless law’. Finally, stateless law may be seen to refer to what is often termed ‘everyday law’: the implicit, generally unarticulated, unofficial normative order that, according to Rod Macdonald, ‘allows us to confront and resolve opportunely most of society’s central legal conundrums’.4 Be it household rules, societal customs regarding queuing up, soccer game rules or corporate practice concerning the performance and enforcement of contractual obligations,5 many legal scholars recognize the significance of everyday law as ‘a separate site, or a separate collection of sites, of human interaction’.6 Many might legitimately think, therefore, that teaching stateless law may refer to incorporating these informal, but crucially important and pervasive, ‘microlegal systems’7 into one’s teaching. The meaning ascribed to ‘stateless law’ in this chapter is distinct from the above permutations. Put simply, the ‘stateless’ nature of law herein refers to the abandonment of the ‘posited law of the nation state as [the] lode star’.8 It refers to what Harry Arthurs has described as ‘decoupling the idea of law from the idea of the state’.9 It reflects the curricular and pedagogical innovation of McGill’s law programme, known unofficially as the ‘transsystemic program’,10 which was inaugurated in 1999 and, at the time of the Stateless conference, celebrated its tenth year of graduates. This ‘unusual curriculum experiment’11 is personified by the transformation of comparative legal pedagogy from the sequential to the integrated; by the creation of blended courses that incorporate a multiplicity of perspectives, voices and lenses in a ‘dialog with otherness’,12 and through inclusion and integration of multiple legal traditions and alternative sites of law. What differentiates this pluralistic vision of legal education from others, in which theoretical, interdisciplinary and non-state legal orders are incorporated into law courses, is not the mere fact of the integration of multiple perspectives, but  3 For instance, in addition to the uniform principles serving as the articulation of generally recognized standards and as potential models for legal reform, parties may formally incorporate these provisions contractually or indicate their wish to have them apply if they bring their dispute to arbitration.  4 Roderick A Macdonald, Lessons of Everyday Law (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press for the Law Commission of Canada and the School of Policy Studies, Queen’s University, 2002) at 6 [Macdonald, Lessons].  5 JG Belley, Le contrat entre droit, économie et société : Etude sociojuridique des achats d’Alcan au SaguenayLac-Saint-Jean (Montreal: Yvon Blais, 1998).  6 Macdonald, Lessons, supra note 4 at 8. See also Daniel Jutras, “The Legal Dimensions of Everyday Life” (2001) 16 CJLS 45.  7 So termed by Reisman: W Michael Reisman, Law in Brief Encounters (New Haven, Conn: Yale University Press, 1999).  8 McGill University Faculty of Law and Quebec Research Centre of Private and Comparative Law, Call for Conference Papers, “Stateless Law? The Future of the Discipline” (conference: 28–29 September 2012), online: MUFL .  9 Harry W Arthurs, “Law and Learning in an Era of Globalization” (2009) 10 German Law Journal 629 at 635 [Arthurs, “Law and Learning”]. 10 See Yves-Marie Morissette, “McGill’s Integrated Civil and Common Law Program” (2002) 52 J Legal Educ 12; Nicholas Kasirer, “Bijuralism in Law’s Empire and in Law’s Cosmos” (2002) 52 J Legal Educ 29 [Kasirer, “Bijuralism”]; David Howes, “Maladroit or Not? Learning to Be of Two Minds in the New Bijural Law Curricula” (2002) 52 J Legal Educ 55; Armand de Mestral, “Guest Editorial: Bisystemic Law-Teaching – The McGill Programme and the Concept of Law in the EU” (2003) 40 CML Rev 799; Peter L Strauss, “Transsystemia – Are We Approaching a New Langdellian Moment? Is McGill Leading the Way?” (2006) 56 J Legal Educ 161; Helge Dedek & Armand de Mestral, “Born to be Wild: The ‘Transsystemic’ Programme at McGill and the De-Nationalization of Legal Education” (2009) 10 German Law Journal 889. 11 Termed as such by Harry Arthurs, “Madly Off in One Direction: McGill’s New Integrated, Polyjural, Transsystemic Law Programme” (2005) 50 McGill LJ 707 at 709 [Arthurs, “Madly Off”]. 12 Morissette, supra note 10 at 22.

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the linking of those perspectives to the transcendent values and perspectives of legal traditions.13 Perhaps Arthurs’s qualification of ‘polyjural’14 is the best single indicator of its essence. This understanding of ‘stateless’ law may, as a result, seem somewhat skewed or even dishonest since state law, in addition to the many forms of stateless law described above, admittedly forms a large part of the curricular content of transsystemic courses. The key, however, is that the reference to the doctrinally limited epistemology of a particular state law is not the central focus, or lodestar, of the course. Rather, the goal is to free the teaching of law from jurisdictional boundaries so as to focus on the fundamental structures, ideas, values, techniques and processes of law, ultimately aiming to undermine the fallacious notion that there is but one structure of reality. As Arthurs puts it, this prepares students to ‘live at ease with multiple truths, irresolvable conflicts, abundant ambiguities and ironies galore’.15 In addition, as noted above, I hope to demonstrate that it also makes students more successful critical and flexible thinkers, developing agile and creative minds that enable them to think open-mindedly within alternative systems of thought, nimbly moving across and, as need be, transcending the boundaries of these systems.16 III. Aspirations for Teaching ‘Stateless Law’ There are multiple goals, justifications and rewards associated with moving legal education from the traditional model, bounded by state normativity, to one that is unbounded and aspires to be uniquely comparative, multisystemic, pluralistic and dialogic.17 Many of these reasons existed at the outset when the new McGill programme was debated and adopted;18 others have been recognized subsequently, as a result of living and teaching within this new pedagogical paradigm. While not exhaustive, the following is an attempt to capture the myriad of opportunities that the transsytemic programme represents both to those within the Faculty, as well as to outside scholars. From an incoming student’s perspective, there are, of course, practical reasons for pursuing such a stateless law programme. At an instrumental level, graduating with both civil and common law degrees19 from a Faculty of Law that is known to offer an academically strong programme of study, producing graduates who are bilingual and bijural, is tangibly beneficial: it opens up the doors to legal practice in a wider variety of legal jurisdictions and in a broader array of non-standard, law-related career opportunities. This, in turn, benefits the Faculty because the attraction of the programme affects the number and quality of applicants, potentially yielding a stronger and more diverse class to teach. The Faculty itself, however, has focused on other important purposes and consequences of the programme that shape not only the manner of teaching in the classroom but extend, as well, to the nature of legal research and scholarship pursed by its professoriate. One of the initial pedagogical justifications for transforming the curriculum was the idea that teaching the two major legal traditions of the western world in an integrated fashion would enable us, quite simply, to teach law comparatively in a more effective manner. Several decades of teaching the civil law and common law in separate courses and discrete programmatic streams demonstrated that it was difficult to achieve the desired result of a truly comparative legal education by teaching distinct traditions of legal thought as separate bodies of knowledge. As Armand de Mestral has noted, in integrated or transsystemic courses, ‘students cease to carry the sole burden of comparative analysis’.20 Being taught by

13 See Rosalie Jukier, “Where Law and Pedagogy Meet in the Transsystemic Contracts Classroom” (2005) 50 McGill LJ 789 at 797–801 [Jukier, “Law and Pedagogy”]. 14 Arthurs, “Law and Learning”, supra note 9 at 636. 15 Ibid. at 639. See also Roderick A Macdonald & Kate Glover, “Implicit Comparative Law” (2013) 43 RDUS 123. 16 I have used this phrase before: see Rosalie Jukier, “Law and Pedagogy”, supra note 13 at 795. 17 These are all descriptors that have been used in reference to the McGill programme. 18 The programme, which was adopted at the Faculty level in March of 1998 (and came into force in the fall of 1999), underwent a lengthy and complex process of curricular reform and was the subject of serious debate and selfreflection over four years, involving the work of many ad hoc committees and focus groups including alumni and students. 19 All graduates of the McGill programme now earn both civil law (B.C.L.) and common law (LL.B.) degrees. 20 De Mestral, supra note 10 at 806.

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professors whose perspectives are no longer unisystemic, ‘comparative analysis ceases to be an addition and becomes central to their work as law students’.21 Both of these reasons are reinforced by the contemporary economic and societal reality often referred to as today’s globalized or transnational world.22 A natural consequence of this globalization is that ‘it is unrealistic to expect legal rules based on territory to be satisfactory’23 and there is, therefore, a need to educate ‘lawyers who are fluent in several languages and legal vernaculars’24 – transnational lawyers with ‘a pluralistic legal identity’.25 The result has been articulated as the desire to educate the ‘cosmopolitan jurist’.26 Evocative of Jeremy Waldron’s notion of the cosmopolitan individual who ‘refuses to think of himself as defined by his location or his ancestry or his citizenship or his language’,27 but is, rather, embodied by a ‘kaleidoscope of cultures’28 living a ‘hybrid lifestyle’,29 McGill likewise seeks to graduate cosmopolitan lawyers, at home in different legal traditions and at ease with different legal languages. The idea of educating the cosmopolitan jurist carries with it many of the practical benefits highlighted above, but also bodes well for a more academic and intellectual model of legal education, another objective of the transsystemic programme. Rather than catering to law as strictly professional training, which befits a state-centric and positivist approach to legal education, the stateless law curriculum assumes that the study of law is ‘an end in itself … an academic discipline’30 that firmly belongs in a university setting.31 While this conception of legal education is certainly not unique to McGill or to faculties that endorse a polyjural curriculum,32 Nicholas Kasirer has explicitly linked the transystemic programme to the concept of law as a liberal education and foundational discipline, calling it ‘an opportunity to locate law more resolutely in the university, not as a matter of geography but of ideas’.33 The openness to other modes of legal thought, emanating from legal traditions and systems with no practical import to the jurisdiction in which they are explored, underscores the relevance of law as belonging to a world of ideas. The opportunity to teach law from a stateless perspective, of course, enables one to do more than ‘structure the comparative endeavour by reference only to political units (states); [or to] limit our inventory of comparative objects to official legal artefacts and to exegetical doctrinal understandings of these artefacts’.34 Freeing courses from jurisdictional boundaries also opens the door to incorporating interdisciplinary perspectives into the curriculum, thereby moving legal education beyond ‘the narrow focus and confined boundaries of linear thinking that define traditional law practice’,35 that narrowness consisting of ‘defining problems as exclusively involving adversarial contests of rights’.36 As Rod Macdonald has pointed out, ‘to 21 Ibid. 22 See also Arthurs, “Law and Learning”, supra note 9. 23 Berman, supra note 2 at 1182. 24 Arthurs, “Law and Learning”, supra note 9 at 636. 25 Jutras, “Two Arguments”, supra note 1 at 79. 26 Richard Janda, “Toward Cosmopolitan Law” (2005) 50 McGill LJ 967 at 984. 27 Jeremy Waldron, “Minority Cultures and the Cosmopolitan Alternative” (1992) 25 U Mich JL Reform 751 at 754. 28 Ibid. at 762. 29 Ibid. at 763. 30 Jutras, “Two Arguments”, supra note 1 at 83. 31 See generally Roderick A Macdonald, “Does Law Have a Place in the Modern University? Or Every Great University Needs a Legal Studies Programme”, LSE Law, Society and Economy Working Papers 4–2012 (2012), online: London School of Economics . See also Jutras, “Two Arguments”, supra note 1 (asserting that the ‘professionalism of legal education … conflicts with its status as a university discipline’ at 85). 32 See e.g. Pierre Schlag, “Ten Thousand Cases, Maybe More – An Essay on Centrism in Legal Education” (2010) 3 Stanford AGORA 1, online: (lamenting the pervasiveness of ‘case law positivism’ in legal education). 33 Kasirer, “Bijuralism”, supra note 10 at 30. 34 See the introduction to Macdonald & Glover, supra note 15. 35 Janet Weinstein, “Coming of Age: Recognizing the Importance of Interdisciplinary Education in Law Practice” (1999) 74 Wash L Rev 319 at 340. The lack of explicit reference to interdisciplinarity in the McGill programme was critically discussed in Arthurs, “Madly Off”, supra note 11 at 715–19. 36 Thomas D Barton, “Creative Problem Solving: Purpose, Meaning, and Values” (1998) 34 Cal WL Rev 273 at 284 [Barton, “Purpose, Meaning, and Values”].

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see any particular incidence of human interaction through the lens of law is a choice’37 and interdisciplinarity demonstrates to students that law is but one lens through which to analyse and solve human problems. Moving the curriculum in this stateless direction also paves the way, more broadly, for a pluralistic conception of legal education. Without venturing into the complexities of the various schools of legal pluralism,38 which is beyond the scope of this chapter, what legal pluralists have in common is their recognition that ‘law does not reside solely in the coercive commands of a sovereign power’.39 Instead, legal pluralism accepts that there are multitudes of norm-generating communities – from the household to the workplace, from religious communities to the international commercial arena40 – that contribute to the creation of a complex web of overlapping sites of law and normative activity. Of course, both interdisciplinarity and pluralism have become well-known themes at many law faculties, and neither of these approaches is within the exclusive purview of faculties whose mission it is to teach law comparatively or transsystemically. However, bringing this form of hybridity into the classroom becomes easier, or more natural, once one abandons the allegiance to state normativity and jurisdictional boundaries tacit in many conceptions of legal education. Paul Schiff Berman notes the inter-relationship between the concepts of multiple legal orders and legal pluralism when he applies what he terms ‘a pluralist framework to the global arena’ and ‘conceptualize[s] a world of hybrid legal spaces’.41 The similarity in approach of legal pluralists and transsystemists is indeed interesting to note. Berman asserts that ‘pluralism fundamentally challenges … assumptions that there can ever be a single answer’.42 This is, of course, a foundational premise of transsystemic teaching: ‘the goal is to hone our students’ skills of imaginative insight, all the while undermining the fallacious notion that there is one structure of reality’.43 Furthermore, similar to transsystemic law teaching, ‘a pluralist conception … deemphasizes territorial location and recognizes the importance of multiple communities’.44 The above overview reveals the myriad of articulated purposes and implications of moving from a legal curriculum based on state allegiance to one that advocates a more ‘stateless’ pedagogy. Given that law teaching is a personal and subjective enterprise, there can be no consensus as to the primary goal or effect of this conception of legal education. Each of the aspirations articulated above has been the subject of serious thought and scholarship, and it is fair to say that each – to varying degrees for individual professors and students – captures the transformative potential of teaching stateless law. The following section identifies an additional advantage of teaching law in this manner, one that has been implicitly recognized but deserves explicit articulation. In particular, this way of teaching stateless law will be linked to the pedagogical objective of cultivating critical and flexible thinking skills in law students, thereby developing not only cosmopolitan jurists, but creative ones as well. IV. Stateless Law as a Vehicle for Teaching Critical Thinking It takes only a quick survey of recent literature in the field of higher education to recognize that inculcating critical thinking skills in students, whatever their academic discipline, has become an important objective of the pedagogical process. Those who have attempted to define the concept of critical thinking all acknowledge

37 Macdonald, Lessons, supra note 4 at 7. 38 From social-scientific legal pluralism to critical legal pluralism: see Martha-Marie Kleinhans & Roderick A Macdonald, “What is a Critical Legal Pluralism?” (1997) 12 CJLS 25. 39 Berman, supra note 2 at 1157. 40 Klaus Peter Berger, “The New Law Merchant and the Global Market Place – A 21st Century View of Transnational Commercial Law” in Klaus Peter Berger, ed, The Practice of Transnational Law (Kluwer Law International, 2001) 1 at 19–21. 41 Berman, supra note 2 at 1159. 42 Ibid. at 1165. 43 Jukier, “Law and Pedagogy”, supra note 13 at 795. I wrote that phrase in 2005 without the benefit of reading Berman’s later article, “Global Legal Pluralism”, supra note 2. 44 Berman, supra note 2 at 1229.

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that it is hard to do so with precision,45 but most agree that it encompasses ‘higher-order thinking processes that are reflected in the higher end of Bloom’s taxonomy of educational objectives’.46 This higher-order thinking is characterized by the skills of analysing, evaluating and creating as opposed to remembering, understanding and applying. Often described by the colloquialism ‘thinking outside of the box’,47 critical thinking focuses on questioning underlying assumptions,48 ‘discovering that which is hidden’,49 and challenging orthodoxy through ‘knowledgeable and skilful disobedience’.50 The goal is to create independent and innovative, as opposed to mechanistic, thinkers,51 and overcome ‘intellectual myopia’.52 The emphasis is shifted to the process, rather than the result, to the question, rather than the answer, to the ‘how’ and ‘why’, rather than the ‘what’. The purpose of this chapter is not to add to the already rich literature on critical thinking, but rather to connect and apply it to the pedagogical approach of teaching ‘stateless law’. At an aspirational level, there is clear overlap in the articulation of the goals of critical thinking and those of teaching transsystemically. Both stress the imperative of considering multiple perspectives, looking at issues through different lenses, transcending and challenging orthodoxy and focusing upon the questions rather than on the answers. In this part of the chapter, I will move beyond the aspirational level and present concrete examples of how teaching in a stateless manner seeks to attain – and succeeds in attaining – the desired outcome of critical thinking. I will then explain how the unique need in transsystemic courses to transcend the boundaries of the taxonomic and doctrinal structures inherent in traditional legal education helps to inculcate flexible thinking skills in students. A. How a Transsystemic Contracts Class Achieves the Stated Outcomes of Critical Thinking It has frequently been asserted that teaching from a multisystemic perspective leads to a richer53 or ‘thicker’54 understanding of law. It is the very ‘cross-cultural dialogue in law’55 and the attempt to teach ‘to the meeting point between the legal traditions’,56 termed ‘métissage’ by Nicholas Kasirer, that enables this deeper understanding. At first blush, it may appear reasonable to assume that this shift in pedagogical approach leads merely to an understanding of more legal systems.57 Yet, experience and closer analysis reveal that the enterprise of learning from the other actually results in teaching us more about ourselves. The irony of this is that as we advocate a move away from positivistic and geographically based conceptions of legal education and incorporate a more pluralistic orientation into the curriculum, the result is often a deeper understanding of the very state law we seek to diminish in importance.

45 Lisa Tsui, “Cultivating Critical Thinking: Insights from an Elite Liberal Arts College” (2006) 55 Journal of General Education 200 at 201; Nickolas James, Clair Hughes & Clare Cappa, “Conceptualising, Developing and Assessing Critical Thinking in Law” (2010) 15 Teaching in Higher Education 285 at 287. Janet Weinstein goes so far as to say that defining creative problem solving may paradoxically mean that ‘once confined to a definition, the concept no longer permits creativity’: supra note 35 at 321. 46 Tsui, supra note 45 at 201; see also David R Krathwohl, “A Revision of Bloom’s Taxonomy: An Overview” (2002) 41 Theory Into Practice 212 at 215. 47 Tsui, supra note 45 at 206; Weinstein, supra note 35 at 321. 48 Patricia H Hinchey, Becoming a Critical Educator: Defining a Classroom Identity, Designing a Critical Pedagogy (New York: Peter Lang, 2008) at 14ff. 49 James, Hughes & Cappa, supra note 45 at 287. 50 Ibid. 51 Tsui, supra note 45 at 206, 222; James, Hughes & Cappa, supra note 45 at 289. 52 Tsui, supra note 45 at 209. 53 I have attempted to show this using the example of teaching specific performance in Jukier, “Law and Pedagogy”, supra note 13 at 801–8. 54 Jutras, “Two Arguments”, supra note 1 at 86. 55 Nicholas Kasirer, “Legal Education as Métissage” (2003) 78 Tul L Rev 481 at 483. 56 Ibid. at 484. 57 Stephen Smith has argued that comparative legal scholarship is no different in kind, but merely in degree, from ordinary domestic legal scholarship due to the fact that it merely examines ‘a broader range of data’: Stephen Smith, “Comparative Legal Scholarship as Ordinary Legal Scholarship” (2010) 5 Journal of Comparative Law 331 at 334.

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1. Questioning assumptions One of the central components of critical thinking involves questioning assumptions,58 daring students to challenge existing orthodoxy so that they can develop the ability to think independently and engage in creative problem solving. As Patricia Hinchey states, ‘the focus in a critical classroom is … on questioning, on examining existing conditions and proposals with a sceptical eye’.59 The dialogic encounter and intersection between legal traditions does just that. Learning other perspectives diminishes the chance that a given jurisdiction’s legal response, or a particular legal tradition’s doctrinal reality, will be taken for granted as orthodox wisdom. The common law doctrine of consideration in Contract law offers a simple example in support of this assertion. Consideration – the elusive, confusing and somewhat artificial sine qua non of all common law contracts – still forms a significant component of first-year Contracts courses. While there are, of course, multiple ways to make its study challenging and critical, there is nonetheless a greater likelihood that students will simply accept the doctrine of consideration as a reality if only exposed to a common law perspective. When students confront the fact that consideration finds no voice in the civil law, and therefore in the multitude of jurisdictions that function within this tradition, it becomes easier for them to question the wisdom of the doctrine’s very existence, and the possibility of serious alternatives to it. Ten years of practical classroom experience demonstrates that learning law bilingually (or multilingually) offers a greater chance of producing jurists who bear less allegiance to one legal nationality. Before the Faculty of Law at McGill moved to a transsystemic approach, students who were educated monojuridically developed a natural tendency to adopt a civilian or common law identity. Those who began in the civil law stream60 had a natural scepticism for the common law that they learned subsequently, given that they had already formed a civilian identity and parallel attachment to its structure and methods. They would regularly bemoan the common law’s disorganized state and the practical difficulties that some of its arcane doctrines, such as consideration and privity, cause in everyday transactions. The same was true of the common law students who took civil law courses sequentially; they would habitually belittle the misleadingly simple structure of the Code and what they perceived to be a less sophisticated legal system. Teaching multiple perspectives simultaneously undermines this myopic tendency and increases the probability of approaching law from a more critical perspective, or at least one that does not tend to adopt, or take for granted, one way of seeing things as reality. Stateless law produces stateless students, able to question the wisdom and perhaps embrace the idiosyncracies of all legal systems within their knowledge. 2. Uncovering hidden assumptions Critical thinking is not only characterized by questioning assumptions, but by uncovering hidden assumptions61 as well. Just as the ability to question orthodoxy is amplified by exposing students to multiple perspectives, so too is the ability of students to explore the hidden reasons and justifications underlying a legal doctrine or outcome. By way of example, we may turn to the teaching of the common law doctrine of undue influence. An equitable doctrine unique to the common law, undue influence enables a party to ask for relief from a contract into which he or she entered due to an abuse of a relationship of trust and confidence, presumed or proven, which enabled the stronger party to take unfair advantage of the contracting party. The intricacies of this doctrine go beyond the scope of this chapter but suffice it to say that much more can be learned about it in the comparative classroom than in the monosystemic one. In the transsystemic classroom, it is precisely the lack of direct equivalent comparators in the civil law tradition that raises the most interesting questions. Students 58 Hinchey, supra note 48 at 14. 59 Ibid. 60 In our former National Programme, while students had the option of graduating with both the LL.B. and B.C.L. degrees, they would nonetheless begin the programme in one ‘stream’ or the other. The Programme was therefore: compartmentalized and involved a side-by-side or sequential treatment, in other words a juxtaposition of civil and common law, rather than a truly integrated approach. Students completed basic private law courses in one or the other tradition in the first year, and not as a matter of choice but as was determined by their entry stream. Subsequently, in the second year or later, they had to complete the corresponding basic private law courses in the other tradition [Morissette, supra note 10 at 18–19]. 61 As James, Hughes & Cappa say, ‘discovering that which is hidden’ (supra note 49 at 287).

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initially express surprise at the lack of civilian counterpart to the doctrine as it exists in the common law; how can one legal system survive without the benefit of a tool that seems so intrinsic to another? The advantage of the transsystemic classroom is that confusion can soon be transformed into a more profound understanding, not just of the approaches of different legal systems, but also of the ideas that animate and underlie these very systems. By being forced to ask how the civil law persists – and continues to aspire to fairness – without the benefit of the tool of undue influence, students must confront why the doctrine exists in the first place, understand the problems it was designed to address and consider alternative approaches to those problems. In this vein, it is interesting to venture outside the classroom and compare mainstream Canadian common law contract law textbooks, such as those written by Waddams62 and McCamus,63 with Atiyah’s treatise on the Introduction to the Law of Contract written by Stephen Smith.64 The former provide interesting and useful commentary on the leading case law on undue influence and the inner workings of this somewhat complicated doctrine. By contrast, the latter includes a lengthy discussion of the basis for relief under the doctrine,65 examining hypotheses that include whether it merely fills the gap that duress and unconscionability leave open, or whether it is more realistically based on the impaired consent of the contracting party seeking relief. Smith asserts that ‘presumed undue influence is a particular kind of impaired consent … most closely related to the defence of incapacity’.66 This explanation is the most interesting, and likely the one most inspired by an understanding of the civil law, in which the integrity of consent of the contracting parties is critically important.67 It is perhaps no accident that Smith teaches at McGill and has accordingly been examining common law undue influence in métissage with the civil law, rather than in isolation. The very lack of civilian counterparts to this doctrine is what opens one up to questioning, and perhaps uncovering, the underlying assumptions of the doctrine itself. B. How Transcending Doctrinal Boundaries Enhances Critical Thinking Skills Both critical thinking and transsystemic teaching espouse ‘transcend[ing] traditional perspectives and approaches’.68 Teaching in a stateless manner requires not only that ‘traditional borders between juridical orders or legal systems be transgressed’,69 but that the very doctrinal categories and taxonomic structures that define these juridical orders and legal systems be abandoned. It is this necessity to eschew established doctrinal categorization that provides the true ‘new mental map’70 in stateless law pedagogy and is the key to instilling more flexible thinking skills in budding jurists. One of the effects of teaching law in the traditional jurisdictionally restrictive model is that the doctrinal and taxonomic structures inherent to a given legal tradition inevitably inform the organization of course syllabi. Before the implementation of the integrated programme, many of McGill’s law courses followed this conventional model of legal education, emulating its divisions by organizing course material into established doctrinal categories. When, however, a course becomes integrated, it does not take long to discover that this established structure breaks down. In most cases, the nomenclature and syntax of the different legal traditions simply do not match up. The concept of ‘Remedies’, for example, a well-known and amply developed area of the common law of Contracts, finds no linguistic equivalent in the civil law. Authors grapple with attempted synonyms such as recours or sanctions but ultimately, these are imprecise translations that actually serve to

62 SM Waddams, The Law of Contracts, 6th ed (Aurora, Ont: Canada Law Book, 2010). 63 John D McCamus, The Law of Contracts 2d ed (Toronto: Irwin Law, 2005). 64 Stephen Smith, Atiyah’s Introduction to the Law of Contract, 6th ed (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). 65 Ibid. at 288–91. 66 Ibid. at 290. 67 Civil Code of Québec, art 1399: Consent may be given only in a free and enlightened manner. It may be vitiated by error, fear or lesion. 68 Tsui, supra note 45 at 206. 69 Shauna Van Praagh, “Navigating the Transsystemic: A Course Syllabus” (2005) 50 McGill LJ 701 at 704. 70 Arthurs, “Law and Learning”, supra note 9 at 635.

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evidence an underlying difference in mentality concerning the consequences of inexecution of contractual obligations in the two traditions.71 This inability to match nomenclature has the fortunate effect of requiring course syllabi to be reorganized around broad underlying themes and larger questions rather than dogmatic doctrinal categories. For instance, as it is obviously impossible to retain the heading of ‘Consideration’ on a stateless course syllabus given that this particular rite of passage for common law contracts is meaningless to the civilian tradition,72 stateless law courses must find other, tradition-neutral headings, such as ‘Conditions of recognition of contracts by the state’ or ‘What else besides consent?’ The result is that lectures are framed by ideas and problems rather than traditional legal doctrinal topics. While this move away from the binds of legal taxonomy is certainly possible in programmes and courses that seek to teach from an interdisciplinary, pluralistic and non-positivistic perspective, it is not a necessary component in the same way as it is in stateless or transsystemic teaching. Returning to the example of undue influence discussed above, that topic is ripe for theoretical and interdisciplinary perspectives such as ones based on critical legal studies, law and economics and feminist theories.73 But these alternative insights are still taught as perspectives on the traditional doctrinal topic of undue influence. It is only when faced with teaching multiple legal traditions that one is required to abandon the title of the doctrine altogether and teach the subject matter within the larger context of tools for controlling or preventing the enforcement of contracts due to concerns about procedural fairness, or the social control of contracts through judicial intervention more generally. Those who have studied and written about critical thinking skills emphasize that inculcating such skills involves not only method (less passivity, more questioning) but curricular decisions as well.74 Therefore, the content, or what one teaches, is as important as how one teaches. Incorporating the content of other legal traditions and systems into the curriculum, resulting in the abandonment of traditional doctrinal taxonomies, is conducive to instilling flexible thinking in students and lays fertile ground for them to ‘think outside the box’. Restricting teaching to one legal system’s responses to legal issues, on the other hand, merely fosters thinking within one box, not outside of it. It may seem strange for a law professor to appear to advocate the eschewing of categories and organization of legal knowledge. After all, ‘one of the crucial tasks of lawyering and judging is to organize the chaos of facts into the ordered patterns of law’.75 This chapter is not, of course, proposing anything of the sort. Law students need to acquire the crucial skills of organizing information appropriately. What is being advocated instead is that law students should not become prisoners of such categories. The goal of critical thinking is ‘dedicated to generating new mentalities and skills to be applied to problems’.76 It is inherently more difficult to generate these new mentalities if ‘by tradition or lack of imagination, a problem is imprisoned within a decisional procedure’77 or ‘channeled too rigidly into contests of rights created under the rules’.78 Teaching without reference to rigid doctrinal categories decreases the inclination of students to apply mechanistically what seem to be obvious, formulaic responses to legal issues. If they do not learn law in silos, students will have a greater chance of being able to engage with alternate systems of thought and to think more openly about a wide array of possible solutions to the problems that necessitate law in the first place. 71 See Helge Dedek, “From Norms to Facts: The Realization of Rights in Common and Civil Private Law” (2010) 56 McGill LJ 77. See also Rosalie Jukier, “Taking Specific Performance Seriously: Trumping Damages as the Presumptive Remedy for Breach of Contract” in Robert J Sharpe & Kent Roach, eds, Taking Remedies Seriously (Montreal: Canadian Institute for the Administration of Justice, 2010) 87. 72 The same would be the case for the heading ‘Intensity of Obligations’, given that it would only be a recognizable topic to those studying a civilian-based legal tradition. 73 Put forward in Richard Devlin, Anthony Duggan & Louise Langevin, “Doing Contract Theory in First Year Law School: The Iceberg Method” [2007] Canadian Legal Education Annual Review 1. 74 Hinchey, supra note 48 at 14. 75 Schlag, supra note 32 at 3. 76 Thomas D Barton, “Conceiving the Lawyer as Creative Problem Solver: Introduction” (1998) 34 Cal WL Rev 267 at 269. 77 Barton, “Purpose, Meaning, and Values”, supra note 36 at 275. 78 Ibid. at 296.

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This phenomenon can be illustrated by an example from a recent Contractual Obligations exam (co-written by myself and my colleague Professor Stephen Smith). One fact pattern question concerned a contract that, as is usually the case on law school exams, went awry. The potential defendant in this scenario told the victim of the alleged contract breach that she had no legal recourse because their contract contained an exclusion of liability clause. Students were asked to advise the victim of the alleged contract breach. In so doing, the majority immediately veered to the sources of the law, in both the civil and common law traditions, on exclusion of liability clauses. They then formulated arguments, some very sophisticated, using those sources to argue for the invalidity or non-applicability of the clause, thereby affording the plaintiff access to a variety of legal remedies. The better answers, however, came from the students were who able to transcend the natural or automatic tendency to apply, by way of knee-jerk reaction, the law within the doctrinal topic of exclusion clauses. Those students recognized that the parties had – on the facts provided – already formed an oral contract, without any discussion of potential exoneration for breach, before the signing of the unread written document that contained the exclusionary clause. Many went on to point out that if the fact pattern took place in a common law jurisdiction, the subsequent written document could be considered a modification of contract without the necessary requirement of fresh consideration and, as a result, the exclusion clause would not apply. Furthermore, others argued, even if the exclusion clause were to be considered as part of the obligational content of the contract, principles of judicial interpretation of contracts would likely have the intended effect of rendering the clause inapplicable to the situation at hand. Only as a last resort, asserted the students thinking in this more creative manner, should the victim of the alleged breach invoke the precarious doctrines of unconscionability79 or abusive clauses80 and the isolated decisions81 that make headlines precisely because they find some way to relieve a party from an exclusion clause. It is not only a stateless law programme that holds the monopoly on imparting critical thinking skills to its students. Such skills may, of course, be inculcated through other means in monosystemic law programmes. However, learning law without the usual emphasis on one jurisdiction’s state law, and its particular set of doctrinal categorization, effectively forces students to get into the habit of thinking about legal problems holistically and thereby lends itself more naturally to the development of such skills. The above example demonstrates that legal pedagogues should challenge students to avoid the automatic tendency to apply the law of an obviously relevant doctrinal category, however well, and encourage them to think outside that category, or box, to imagine other solutions and other lenses through which they can solve legal problems. This is what Weinstein refers to as creative problem solving for lawyers: it consists of ‘looking at problems in new ways – different from the traditional classification of problems into legal categories … and looking for new solutions that might stretch beyond the traditional boundaries’.82 This is a tall order, as students have been taught from a young age to apply vertical thinking skills, finding the appropriate category into which a problem falls and solving it using the mechanistic formula provided by established orthodoxy. We must teach students to add horizontal thinking skills to their repertoire of thinking tools. An effective way of doing so is by eschewing the doctrinal categories and taxonomies that state normativity thrusts upon us, and teaching in a less compartmentalized manner. This method opens students’ minds to a wider array of possible solutions and offers them tools to deal creatively with contemporary problems of justice. Viewing the benefits of teaching stateless law in this manner serves to meet the oft-encountered reaction of many that, while extremely interesting and perhaps ‘one of the most unusual curriculum experiments in 79 For a recent discussion of the limits of unconscionability in Canada, see Tercon Contractors Ltd v British Columbia (Transportation and Highways), 2010 SCC 4, [2010] 1 SCR 69, 315 DLR (4th) 385. 80 See Civil Code of Québec, art 1437: An abusive clause in a consumer contract or contract of adhesion is null, or the obligation arising from it may be reduced. An abusive clause is a clause which is excessively and unreasonably detrimental to the consumer or the adhering party and is therefore not in good faith; in particular, a clause which so departs from the fundamental obligations arising from the rules normally governing the contract that it changes the nature of the contract is an abusive clause. 81 See e.g. Tilden Rent-A-Car Co v Clendenning (1978), 18 OR (2d) 601, 83 DLR (3d) 400 (Ont CA). 82 Weinstein, supra note 35 at 321. While Weinstein is describing the creativity that comes from incorporating interdisciplinarity into the legal curriculum, her words are equally applicable to approaching the teaching of creativity and flexible thinking skills through teaching law in a stateless manner.

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the annals of legal education’,83 this sort of legal pedagogy is not relevant for those in jurisdictions that are not systemically bilingual as is the province of Quebec, Canada. Of course, one cannot diminish the practical relevance of such a law programme in a mixed jurisdiction or deny that ‘[t]he epistemology of McGill’s law school is largely a product of a uniquely Canadian brand of legal pluralism rooted in its Quebec location and identity’.84 However, in a world that increasingly demands creative problem solving, viewed from a pedagogical perspective of helping to inculcate critical thinking skills, this type of teaching begins to make much more sense, even where the practical importance of exposing students to different legal traditions is perhaps minimal. V. Conclusion ‘If we would get stuck on a particularly thorny problem, it was very often helpful to switch gears and adopt the lens of another tradition in order to gain a point of entry’. These are the words of one of my students, Alain Henri Deschamps, after his first year of law studies in McGill’s version of a stateless law programme. He went on to say, unprompted, that this method of learning law ‘gave us an instinct for flexible thinking’. Another of my students, Nicola Langille, after two years in the programme, stated that ‘McGill students know that they will inevitably have to confront a given problem from the perspective of at least the two major legal traditions of the civil and the common law, and often from multiple legal systems within those traditions. The most effective (not to mention interesting) way to do so is not to become trapped within the starting points and assumptions of one legal system, but rather to conceive of the scenario as presenting simply a human problem that must be addressed. It is the development of and ability to demonstrate this legal agnosticism that best encapsulate the benefits of the McGill programme’. This chapter has attempted to demonstrate that in addition to the many aspirations and benefits of teaching law without reference to the state as its lodestar outlined above, one of the most pedagogically useful results is that of connecting the dots between teaching in this manner and inculcating critical and flexible thinking skills in our students. The hope is for our students to become cosmopolitan jurists who can meet contemporary issues of justice and public policy head on with the most creative and open of minds.

83 Arthurs, “Madly Off”, supra note 11 at 709. 84 Nicholas Kasirer, “‘K’ as a Structure of Anglo-American Legal Knowledge” (1997) 22 Can L L 159 at 164.

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Epilogue

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Chapter 17

What Lies Before, Behind and Beneath a Case? Five Minutes on Transnational Lawyering and the Consequences for Legal Education Downloaded by [University of California, San Diego] at 23:17 11 March 2017

Peer Zumbansen*

Caveat I am, of course, borrowing my title and ambition from Gustav Radbruch.1 The Social Democratic politician and legal philosopher was born in 1878 and served as Justice Minister during the early years of the Weimar Republic. He died in 1949. The ‘Five Minutes’ anticipated and captured the gist of his famous 1946 Lawlessness essay,2 in which he observed that the Nazi judiciary had been rendered ‘defenceless’ by Legal Positivism. He went on to state that the discrepancy, however, between Nazi ‘law’ and law built on Zweckmäßigkeit (expediency) and Gerechtigkeit (justice) had been so significant that the former could not have been ‘law at all’. In his 1945 sketch for the Rhein-Neckar-Zeitung newspaper, we find this idea expressed already in succinct form, delivered in five short paragraphs. The first paragraph (‘Minute’) states that for both soldiers and lawyers/judges, the Nazi formula was that orders had to be obeyed, but in law it is required of the judge to evaluate whether there is an unbearable discrepancy between what is the ‘law’ and what ‘ought’ to be the law in light of considerations of expediency and justice. Minute 2 was devoted to the pronouncement that not all that serves the people would count as ‘law’, but rather that only what ‘is’ law serves the people. In Minute 3 he stated that law had to strive for justice, which meant that it must be committed to the respect for the individual and strive for equal protection for all. The next Minute, the fourth, is crucial as Radbruch here addresses the final element to accompany expediency and justice. That element – legal certainty – however, can of course be central to any authoritarian or non-authoritarian rule of law: in response to the concept’s attractive elusiveness and instrumentalizability,3 Radbruch formulates the phrase later famously endorsed in the Lawlessness essay: legal certainty has to back down where the gap between the law and what we think law must be becomes unbearably wide. In the fifth Minute, he provides us with the justificatory basis on which to evaluate and bridge the gap; referring to a core content of natural law, as it evolved over the course of centuries, Radbruch suggests that it is God’s law that will ultimately strike the balance. I am afraid that my own five minutes for this epilogue at the end of an inspiring volume, on the theme of ‘stateless law’ and transsystemic legal education on the occasion of McGill’s Faculty of Law’s tenth anniversary celebration of its ‘transsystemic’ programme, are already over, and all that was achieved was to invoke a seminal legal philosophical intervention. And, now that my five minutes are over before I could even *  I am grateful to Daniel Jutras, Dean of Law, McGill University, as well as to Professors Helge Dedek, Lionel Smith and Shauna Van Praagh, for the invitation to contribute to the Stateless Law conference, and to Simon Archer, Helge Dedek, Priya Gupta, Alexandra Kemmerer and Hengameh Saberi for their valuable feedback. Finally, I am extremely indebted to Jennifer Anderson for her excellent edits in the final version. 1 Gustav Radbruch, “Fünf Minuten Rechtsphilosophie”, Rhein-Neckar-Zeitung (12 September 1945), published in English as Gustav Radbruch, “Five Minutes of Legal Philosophy (1945)”, translated by Bonnie Litschewski Paulson & Stanley L Paulson (2006) 26:1 Oxford J Legal Stud 13. 2 Gustav Radbruch, “Gesetzliches Recht und übergesetzliches Unrecht” (1946) Süddeutsche Juristenzeitung 105, published in English as Gustav Radbruch, “Statutory Lawlessness and Supra-Statutory Law”, translated by Bonnie Litschewski Paulson & Stanley L Paulson (2006) 26 Oxford J Legal Stud 1. 3 See Alvaro Santos, “The World Bank’s Uses of the ‘Rule of Law’ Promise in Economic Development” in David M Trubek & Alvaro Santos, eds, The New Law and Economic Development. A Critical Appraisal (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2006) 253.       

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begin to explain the connection between Radbruch and transsystemia, please allow me another five minutes to justify this act of disobedience.

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I. Transsystemia McGill’s programme notably bridges the idiosyncracies and particularities of the civil and common law by instructing students in a combination of principles and concepts borrowed from both legal cultures. In that process, much more happens than merely another attempt to think about what keeps civil and common law apart or what connects them. Regardless of how committed the programme instructors might or might not be to keeping the Civ-Com-Law comparison at the heart of their training, the enterprise inevitably exposes students to the much larger conceptual challenges as well as practical challenges arising from an engagement with law on the basis that it has multiple foundations as well as historical evolutionary trajectories – the bottom halves of the icebergs that are the grand system and theory clashes in law, as McGill’s Patrick Glenn once called them.4 Once notions of context and evolution begin to enter the imagination, it becomes one thing to state that the transsystemic orientation is centred around civil and common law – it becomes quite another to keep it that way. As students learn about the origins, character traits and modes of development of each, they are becoming increasingly aware of how laws are products5 that can only be understood from within a particular context in which they are accepted and employed as law or, as the case may be, rejected as other-than-law, non-law or unjust law. Meanwhile, the words, terms and categories are but attempts to give expression to the different meanings of law, a process that must always remain tentative, experimentalist.6 As this engagement with law’s mind and matter informs the design and implementation of the law school’s ambitious legal education programme, a crucial insight the students can gain already at the beginning of their training in how to both understand and navigate the boundaries between civil and common law is that what the two legal cultures have in common is more than what separates them. From that perspective, the boundaries between the two cultures begin to appear in a different light. They are now becoming explainable against particular historical data, concrete contexts and examples as well as the institutional and political roads taken. At the same time, students begin to appreciate how the distinction between civil and common law, to the degree that it aims to capture enduring differences in character and nature, is perhaps more a matter of convention and discursive practice than actually grounded in the ongoing practice of either. Namely, the common law’s core feature, that is, its commitment to and the central role played by adjudication, can relatively easily be found all across so-called civil law systems. We could add further elements to illustrate the ultimate elusiveness of the purported boundaries between the two legal cultures, but that is not necessary. More important for our present purpose is to take one step back and look at the context in which this discussion is taking place today. It is in this context that I am most interested in reflecting on the immense merits and promises of a programme such as McGill’s. A few keywords stand out which appear to sketch the contours as well some of the structural features of this context. The increasing proliferation of non-state actors that were involved in the preparation of and collaboration in, or were even solely responsible for, the production of norms was a central feature of the modern Western welfare state throughout the course of the late twentieth century.7 This diffusion of norm-creation from the state to a wide range of societal actors has prompted everything from doomsday pronouncements regarding the decline of public authority to Carl Schmitt’s lament over the Leviathan being cut up and devoured by society,8 4 H Patrick Glenn, “Doin’ the Transsystemic: Legal Systems and Legal Traditions” (2005) 50 McGill LJ 863 at 867. 5 See Michel Villey, Leçons d’histoire de la philosophie du droit, revised ed (Paris: Dalloz, 1962) at 202, cited in Glenn, supra note 4 (‘le juriste défend une cause. Décrire pour lui c’est choisir’ at 870). 6 See Daniel Jutras, “Enoncer l’indicible : le droit entre langues et traditions” (2000) 52:4 RIDC 781 (‘on peut … dire que les représentations propres à chaque tradition constituent autant de tentatives d’exprimer une normativité souterraine et indicible, une normativité implicite, sinon immanente aux rapports sociaux, qui déborde les cultures juridiques nationales’ at 795–6). 7 See Colin Scott, “Private Regulation of the Public Sector: A Neglected Facet of Contemporary Governance” (2002) 29 JL & Soc’y 56; Bronwen Morgan & Karen Yeung, An Introduction to Law and Regulation: Texts and Materials (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2007). 8 Carl Schmitt, “Staatsethik und pluralistischer Staat” in C Schmitt, Positionen und Begriffe im Kampf mit Weimar – Genf – Versailles 1923–1939 (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1988 [1940]) 133, published in English as Carl Schmitt, “State

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to triumphant claims that the welfare state was an erroneous path9 from which only the embrace of societal self-regulation, ‘social norms’ and a rejection of an interventionist state could save us.10 Somewhere in the middle of this conceptual and real institutional and procedural turf war, ideas of adapting law to these changing circumstances emerged: in the names of responsive11 and reflexive law,12 and even in the name of learning13 law, scholars sought to capture the essence of law as an instrument of people’s egalitarian self-government, in a context in which the welfare state’s capacity to develop and deliver social safeguards had started to become precarious, both financially and conceptually. This ‘exhaustion’ of the welfare state, as Jürgen Habermas called it,14 resulted in a normative and institutional ambiguity that indeed encapsulates much of the structure we are confronted with in our present-day transnational constellation.15 The ‘pluralism’ of global legal cultures is referred to in empirical-sociological16 as well as normative-philosophical17 ways. The diffusion of norm creation processes through ‘hard’ forms such as treaties and legislation to more ‘soft’ forms including conventions, codes, guidelines to even more elusive, possibly out-of-legal-bounds norms such as recommendations, suggestions and public relations statements illustrates the richness of a regulatory wonderland, but the politics of it all remain, well, all over the place. Who counts as a competent actor in this hybrid, pluralistic norm-creation universe? The individual or organization with the expertise, competence and most adequate understanding of the problem at hand? Or, he or she who is authorized to deliver (and enforce) binding norms of law? The transnational regulatory landscape is above all characterized by an intriguing, if often bewildering, coexistence and interaction among Actors, Norms and Processes.18 What are we to make of these terms? Do they constitute ‘new’ categories of ‘old’, Western welfare-state institutional-conceptual frameworks such as the rule of law, separation of powers, normative hierarchy and unity of law, or are they bloodless phrases, loosely attached to the madness of global un-law with a piece of gum? II. Reality Bites We are not making any of this up. Read Jack Goldsmith’s poignant reminder of what was at stake when, on what could have been the eve of a US-led attack on Syria, the entirely legally ambiguous ‘precedent’ of the NATO bombing of Serbia 1999 was used to justify the ‘enforcement’ of ‘international norms’ through

Ethics and the Pluralist State”, translated by Belinda Cooper, in Arthur J Jacobson & Bernhard Schlink, eds, Weimar: A Jurisprudence of Crisis (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2000) 300. 9 FA Hayek, The Mirage of Social Justice (in Law, Legislation and Liberty. A New Statement of the Liberal Principles of Justice and Political Economy, vol 2) (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976). This claim simply keeps repeating itself: see e.g. Christian Hoffmann & Pierre Bessard, eds, Sackgasse Sozialstaat: Alternativen zu einem Irrweg (Zurich: Liberales Institut, 2011). 10 See the critical takes by two who know: Robert C Ellickson, “Law and Economics Discovers Social Norms” (1998) 27 J Legal Stud 537; Stewart Macaulay, “Relational Contracts Floating on a Sea of Custom? Thoughts about the Ideas of Ian Macneil and Lisa Bernstein” (2000) 94 Nw UL Rev 775. 11 Gunther Teubner, “Substantive and Reflexive Elements in Modern Law” (1983) 17 Law & Soc’y Rev 239. 12 Philippe Nonet & Philip Selznick, Law and Society in Transition: Toward Responsive Law (New York: Octagon Books, 1978). 13 Charles F Sabel & Jonathan Zeitlin, “Learning from Difference: The New Architecture of Experimentalist Governance in the EU” (2008) 14 Eur LJ 271; Peer Zumbansen, “Law’s Effectiveness and Law’s Knowledge: Reflections from Legal Sociology and Legal Theory” (2009) 10 German Law Journal 417 [Zumbansen, “Law’s Effectiveness”]. 14 Jürgen Habermas, “The New Obscurity: The Crisis of the Welfare State and the Exhaustion of Utopian Energies [1985]” in Jürgen Habermas, The New Conservatism. Cultural Criticism and the Historians’ Debate, edited and translated by Shierry Weber Nicholsen (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1989) 48. 15 See e.g. Kenneth W Abbott & Duncan Snidal, “Strengthening International Regulation through Transnational New Governance: Overcoming the Orchestration Deficit” (2009) 42 Vand J Transnat’l L 501. 16 Roderick A MacDonald & Jason MacLean, “No Toilets in Park” (2005) 50 McGill LJ 721; Boaventura de Sousa Santos, “Law: A Map of Misreading. Toward a Postmodern Conception of Law” (1987) 14 JL & Soc’y 279. 17 N Kasirer, “Lex-icographie mercatoria” (1999) 47 Am J Comp L 653. 18 Peer Zumbansen, “Transnational Private Regulatory Governance: Ambiguities of Public Authority and Private Power” (2013) 76:2 Law & Contemp Probs 117.

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unilateral military action.19 How much would our public international law students learn if we engaged them in this turmoil over what is and what isn’t, what should and what shouldn’t be a precedent?20 Maybe, then, all we can do is to learn as we go along. Just as J.M. Keynes both recognized and cautioned against the human tendency to read yesterday’s numbers to predict their magnitude today,21 we often hopelessly use legal history and doctrine to write lines in the sand.22 Instead, what we want to do, and what Radbruch intended, is to make connections, for example between present experiences of crisis and loss of bearings and the past and present of human conventions, of instances of consensus and pronouncement that themselves grew out of processes of deliberation that were both hard fought for and hard fought over.23 We have long learned that the legitimacy of such processes depends on Radbruch’s and our capacity not only to hear Him, but to question the boundaries and scope of the ‘we’.24 In other words, questions of belonging, membership, and integration are central for a legal system, the institutional foundations of which have become so diffuse.25 Connected to these must be an awareness of the ongoing and effective processes of exclusion, demarcation and devaluation.26 One person’s terrorist is another’s freedom fighter. Precedent, in law, is caught up in legal narrative. That narrative, the reconstruction of meaning along what becomes a ‘line of cases’, is always embedded, as the Kosovo-as-precedent example illustrates, in an infinite number of alternative narratives. We are only too aware of this in any instance of legal interpretation27 as well as in our identification of normativity.28 The true challenge for lawyers is the conscious navigation of the space between the case that’s before the court and the ‘cases’ behind, before and – most importantly – beneath that case. Looking at this, we open our curriculum catalogues and course programmes and wonder: What is it that we are doing? What should lawyers study today? Why are we constantly both disturbed and intrigued by calls for the introduction of more business-school-like ‘case studies’ in legal education?29 Maybe our scepticism has its roots in a stubborn insistence on law’s embeddedness in a long history that is, above all, a trove of discursive and political struggles over the very meaning of the words which are traded on today’s market of attention. The awareness of this history and background leads to Hercules’ humility and aspiration to ‘get it right’.30 Meanwhile, why not ‘teach’ Goldsmith’s op.-ed31 rather than Simma’s and Cassese’s 1999 stand-off 19 Jack L Goldsmith, “What happened to the rule of law?”, The New York Times (31 August 2013), online: NYT . 20 The background can easily be discerned here: Martti Koskenniemi, “‘The Lady Doth Protest Too Much’: Kosovo, and the Turn to Ethics in International Law” (2002) 65 Mod L Rev 159; Anne Orford, “Muscular Humanitarianism: Reading the Narratives of the New Interventionism” (1999) 10 EJIL 679; Andreas Paulus, “The War against Iraq and the Future of International Law: Hegemony or Pluralism?” (2004) 25 Mich J Int’l L 691. For an insightful engagement with precedent, see Frederick Schauer, “Precedent” in: Andrei Marmor, ed, The Routledge Companion to Philosophy of Law (New York: Routledge, 2012) 123. 21 John Maynard Keynes, General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1936) ch 12. 22 Robert J Shiller, Irrational Exuberance, 2d ed (New York: Currency Doubleday, 2006); George A Akerlof & Robert J Shiller, Animal Spirits. How Human Psychology Drives the Economy, and Why It Matters for Global Capitalism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009). 23 Paul Pierson, Politics in Time: History, Institutions, and Social Analysis (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004). 24 Boaventura de Sousa Santos, “Beyond Abyssal Thinking: From Global Lines to Ecologies of Knowledge”, Eurozine (29 June 2007), online: Eurozine . 25 Seyla Benhabib, The Rights of Others. Aliens, Residents and Citizens (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2004). 26 Roderick A MacDonald, “Whose Access? Which Justice?” (1992) 7 CJLS 175. 27 Robert M Cover, “Foreword: Nomos and Narrative” (1983) 97 Harv L Rev 4k. 28 Sally Falk Moore, “Law and Social Change: The Semi-Autonomous Social Field as an Appropriate Subject of Study” (1973) 7 Law & Soc’y Rev 719; Douglas R Holmes & George E Marcus, “Cultures of Expertise and the Management of Globalization: Toward the Re-Functioning [sic] of Ethnography”, in Aihwa Ong & Stephen J Collier, eds, Global Assemblages: Technology, Politics, and Ethics as Anthropological Problems (Malden, Mass: Blackwell, 2005), 235–52. 29 See e.g. the “Law and Business” programme at Harvard Law School, online: . 30 Ronald Dworkin, Law’s Empire (Cambridge, Mass: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1986). 31 Supra note 19.

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in the European Journal of International Law?32 How can we combine the accessibility, sharpness and inthe-midst-of-it-all nature of the op.-ed with the formidably rich yet succinct restatements of legality as the ultimate boundary on the one hand (Simma) and legitimacy as the necessary herald of a new legality on the other (Cassese)?

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III. The ‘Cases’ Behind, Before and Beneath the Case Verba docent, exempla trahunt. Rather than teaching law from Abraham, Raskolnikov or H.L.A. Hart, why not read the news? Why not confront students with the reality and complexity of the ‘cases’ unfolding right before our eyes? Why not try to give students the facility to discern the ‘legal aspects’ of stories reported by the media, stories that centrally implicate competing visions of justice, human rights and social order? September 2007: The Canadian federal government begins to implement the Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement (IRSSA).33 The IRSSA had been concluded the previous year following an inherently troubled alternative dispute resolution process, eventually launched, after earlier attempts, in 2003. Beyond establishing a system to determine eligibility and to distribute pro-rated financial compensations to former students of the Canadian ‘Indian Residential Schools’ system, the Settlement further resulted in the institutionalization of the Indian Residential Schools Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Launched in 2008, it is expected that the TRC will conclude its work in 2014. The Canadian Prime Minister, Stephen Harper, publicly issued a Statement of Apology34 on the part of the Canadian state for the role that the government had played in the establishment and administration of the residential schools. What is the significance of the settlement, the approval, the apology, the commission?35 November 2011: The German Federal Administrative Court upholds a ban on Muslim prayers performed in a public (Berlin) high school during break-hours, making reference to the need to protect peace and order in the school.36 A group of Muslim adolescents had, in a relatively removed part of the school, performed Muslim ritual prayers, a practice that the school board declared impermissible. After the court of first instance struck down this ban,37 the respondents eventually saw the highest administrative court side with the school’s administration. Arguing that the constitutional guarantee of religious freedom, as protected under the German Grundgesetz (Constitution), found its limits in the right of the state to maintain a secular, non-discriminatory space for public education, the Court sparks a wide-ranging debate over the exercise of religious rights in public spaces.38

32 Bruno Simma, “NATO, the UN and the Use of Force: Legal Aspects” (1999) 10:1 EJIL 1; Antonio Cassese, “Ex inuiria ius oritur: Are We Moving towards International Legitimation of Forcible Humanitarian Countermeasures in the World Community?” (1999) 10 EJIL 23. 33 For the official website of the Settlement Agreement, see online . The caption on the homepage reads, ‘The residential schools settlement has been approved. The healing continues’. 34 For the text of the Statement of Apology, see Aboriginal Affairs and Northern Development Canada, News Release, “Prime Minister Harper offers full apology on behalf of Canadians for the Indian Residential Schools system” (11 June 2008), online: AANDC . 35 Melanie Laing, “An Analysis of Canada’s Indian Residential Schools Truth and Reconciliation Commission” (2013) 4 Undergraduate Transitional Justice Review 51; David B MacDonald & Graham Hudson, “The Genocide Question and Indian Residential Schools in Canada” (2012) 45 Canadian Journal of Political Science 427; see especially Jennifer J Llewellyn, “Dealing with the Legacy of Native Residential School Abuse in Canada: Litigation, ADR, and Restorative Justice” (2002) 52:3 UTLJ 253. 36 German Federal Administrative Court (Bundesverwaltungsgericht), Decision of 30 November 2011 [BVerwG 6 C 20.10]; for a discussion, see Hannah Rubin, “Das islamische Gebet in der Schule”, Case Comment on BVerwG 6C 20.10 (2012) JURA – Juristische Ausbildung 718. 37 Administrative Court Berlin (Verwaltungsgericht), Decision of 29 September 2009 [3 A 394.07]. 38 See e.g. AFP, “German school wins court backing for Muslim prayer”, Al Arabiya News (30 November 2011), online: Al Arabiya .

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May 2012: A German district court recognizes criminal battery in the case of a medical practitioner who, two years prior, had performed a male circumcision on a four-year-old Muslim with parental consent.39 An outcry across a range of religious as well as secular organizations, interest groups and activists follows this decision. Ten months later, the German federal government initiates a law explicitly legalizing male circumcision.40 Polls show that 70 per cent of the public disagrees with this legislation. February 2013: Following a wave of protests, riots and unofficial strikes as well as numerous worker suicides among the 1.2 million employees of the Taiwan-based Apple products manufacturing company Foxconn in China, Apple announces that it will allow the periodic election of union representatives for Foxconn employees. Despite broad concern with worker conditions at the factories of this global brand company, the unionization news is met with considerable scepticism.41 Criticism is levelled against the questionable election processes and the asymmetric power distribution between management and employees within the union. April 2013: The US Supreme Court rules in a case brought by a group of Nigerian human rights groups and activists that the 1789 Alien Tort Statute (ATS)42 does not provide a substantive claim in cases of alleged human rights violations by multinationals in foreign jurisdictions. The Kiobel decision43 follows on a string of related cases all concerned with the justiciability of egregious rights violations by corporations, often colluding with paramilitaries or other host country officials against company employees and other segments of the local population.44 The decision is received with great disappointment, as the ATS had become a promising, if always ambiguous, vehicle not only to litigate such cases, but also to bring the underlying facts to a wider, Western public attention.45 June 2013: the US Supreme Court delivers two much anticipated same-sex marriage decisions. For many years already, this issue has been on the minds of lawmakers, activists and the general public in many countries around the world. The Court’s much anticipated decision in United States v Windsor46 in particular is, despite competing – including transnational47 – interpretations of the judgment’s consequences, generally seen as a significant step in the evolution of the law in this area. Domestically, the public policy debate surrounding and following the Supreme Court’s verdict goes private: in the midst of this ongoing conversation about ‘horizontal effect’, governmental ‘intervention’ and corporate social responsibility, Walmart, with 1.2 million 39 Regional Court (Landgericht) Cologne, Judgment of 7 May 2012 [151 Ns 169/11], (2012) Neue Juristische Wochenschrift 2128; for a discussion, see Bijan Fateh-Moghadam, “Criminalizing Male Circumcision? Case Note: Landgericht Cologne, Judgment of 7 May 2012 – No. 151 Ns 169/11”, (2012) 13 German Law Journal 1131. 40 § 1631d Bürgerliches Gesetzbuch [BGB, the German Civil Code]. See also Deutscher Bundestag, News Release, “Beschneidung von Jungen jetzt gesetzlich geregelt” (12 December 2012), online: . See also the text of the bill: Entwurf eines Gesetzes über den Umfang der Personensorge bei einer Beschneidung des männlichen Kindes, Doc no 17/11295 (5 November 2012), online: DB: . 41 See e.g. “Foxconn labour union elections: A wind of change”, Mirova Focus (13 March 2013), online: Mirova . 42 28 USC § 1350. 43 Kiobel v Royal Dutch Petroleum Co, 133 S Ct 1659, 185 L Ed 2d 671 (2013). 44 Odette Murray, David Kinley & Chip Pitts, “Exaggerated Rumours of the Death of an Alien Tort? Corporations, Human Rights and the Remarkable Case of Kiobel” (2011) 12 Melbourne Journal of International Law 57. 45 Center for Justice & Accountability, “Kiobel v Shell: Light Dims on Human Rights Claims in the US”, Case Comment (nd), online: CJA ; see also Susan Bisom-Rapp, “The Irony of the Supreme Court’s Decision in Kiobel v Royal Dutch Petroleum”, Blog Post, Law Professor Blogs Network, Workplace Prof Blog (18 April 2013), online: . 46 133 S Ct 2675, 186 L Ed 2d 808. 47 See “US v Windsor: A Case for Same-Sex Marriages”, Blog Post, Polity in India – India as an Evolving Polity (9 July 2013), online: ; see also Darshan Datar, “Constitutional Principles in US v Windsor in the Indian Context”, Blog Post, Centre for Law & Policy Research (23 July 2013), online: (discussing the significance of the US Supreme Court’s ruling in the Indian context after Naz Foundation v Govt of NCT of Delhi (2009), 160 Delhi Law Times 277, the 2009 Delhi High Court judgment which legalized homosexuality).

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US employees the country’s biggest private sector employer, announces that it will extend the company’s health care benefits to same-sex partners of members of its workforce, effective immediately.48 Directly following this news, labour as well as LGBT representatives lament that in reality a large number of Walmart employees cannot afford to contract into the company’s health care plan in the first place.49 Question: Should law students learn how to address cases such as those anecdotally rendered here? If the answer is ‘yes’, the next question is how to teach students the ‘law’ of these ‘cases’. Assumption: Sometimes, as with Foxconn or, even more recently, the long-brooding struggle over labour and human rights in the Bangladeshi ready-made-garment industry,50 some of these cases are not ‘cases’ yet and hence there is perhaps no easy way to include them in the curriculum. ‘Skills training’, clinical legal education,51 ‘experiential learning’52 – all these are but the tips of an iceberg representing deeper disputes over the aims of legal education, the roles of lawyers in a changing, transnationalizing53 society and a destabilization of employment and long-term security.54 The task of reforming legal education, thus regarded, becomes an exercise in reflection upon the nature of legal knowledge55 and the scope of ethical and political responsibility of lawyers.56 Association: Take the example of the IRSSA. What is the legal ‘field’ in which the different dimensions of this ‘case’ would best be addressed? To make this line of inquiry even more salient: which course at a law school would likely include a session on the Settlement for its students? Is the IRSSA a (Canadian) example of an increasingly transnational concern with what is increasingly referred to as transitional justice, itself an important and ever-faster growing ‘field’?57 If so, what are the lessons of the IRSSA for law students? How and in which course should they learn about the procedural intricacies, the access-to-justice challenges and the law-and-reconciliation dimensions that are at the heart of the Settlement?58 What will happen is that this ‘problem’ (not case) will perhaps, if at all, be addressed in a new, small seminar on ‘Transitional Justice’. Alternatively, we could imagine it playing a role in courses on ‘Legal Professionalism’, ‘Legal Foundations’, ‘Legal Sociology’ or, perhaps, ‘Legal History’. In the context of such courses, presumably taught at the start

48 Daniel Gross, “Walmart’s new embrace of gay employees a sign of corporate shift”, The Daily Beast (29 August 2013), online: DB . 49 Matt Brownell, “Walmart to offer benefits to same-sex partners, leaked memo reveals”, Daily Finance (27 August 2013), online: DF . 50 See e.g. Edward Bearnot, “Bangladesh: A Labor Paradox”, The World Policy Journal 30:3 (Fall 2013), online: World Policy Institute . 51 Nadia Chiesa, “The Five Lessons I Learned through Clinical Legal Education” (2009) 10 German Law Journal 1113; Richard J Wilson, “Western Europe: Last Holdout in the Worldwide Acceptance of Clinical Legal Education” (2009) 10 German Law Journal 823. 52 Lorne Sossin, “Experience the Future of Legal Education” (2013) Osgoode Hall Law School Comparative Research in Law & Political Economy Research Paper No 47/2013, online: Social Science Research Network . 53 Helge Dedek & Armand de Mestral, “Born to be Wild: The ‘Trans-systemic’ Programme at McGill and the De-Nationalization of Legal Education” (2009) 10 German Law Journal 889; Rosalie Jukier, “Challenging the Existing Paradigm: How to Transnationalize the Legal Curriculum” (2006) 24 Penn State International Law Review 775; Philip B Bevans & John S McKay, “‘The Association of Transnational Law Schools’ Agora: An Experiment in Graduate Legal Pedagogy” (2009) 10 German Law Journal 929. 54 Guy Standing, The Precariat. The New Dangerous Class (New York: Bloomsbury, 2011); see, in this vein, Richard Sennett, The Culture of the New Capitalism (New Haven, Conn: Yale University Press, 2006). 55 Zumbansen, “Law’s Effectiveness”, supra note 13; Margaret Thornton, “The Law School, the Market and the New Knowledge Economy” (2009) 10 German Law Journal 641. 56 Harry W Arthurs, “Law and Learning in an Era of Globalization” (2009) 10 German Law Journal 629. 57 See e.g. the contributions to Ruch Buchanan & Peer Zumbansen, eds, Law in Transition: Human Rights, Development and Transitional Justice (Oxford: Hart, forthcoming 2014). See also Peer Zumbansen, “Law & Society and the Politics of Relevance: Facts and Field Boundaries in ‘Transnational Legal Theory in Context’” (2014) 11 No Foundations 1. 58 Rosemary L Nagy, “The Scope and Bounds of Transitional Justice and the Canadian Truth and Reconciliation Commission” (2013) 7 International Journal of Transitional Justice 1.

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of the increasingly condensed59 and simultaneously overburdened legal programme, the Settlement will at the least function as an element providing some historical context for those students aware of these events as well as with an interest in ‘Aboriginal law’ or ‘transitional justice’. At best, the Settlement could serve as an illustration of the many complex layers of a problem as they become visible when lawyers attempt to find a legal solution to a deeply ingrained and only very incompletely ‘worked through’ historical experience.60 Utopia: Students enrolled in a class on ‘Mediation and ADR’ would be confronted with a fast-growing range of non-commercial, non-corporate legal conflicts that demand alternative dispute resolution techniques and competences.61 An array of disputes from fields such as, say, labour,62 family63 or commercial law,64 along with an example such as the IRSSA, could then be used to introduce students to the paradoxical relation between, on the one hand, the limits of the law in trying to adequately grasp and address all the dimensions of the IRSSA as they become evident through the TRC proceedings65 and wide-ranging public debates, and on the other hand, the potential for law to push these boundaries and limits in order to make itself more receptive and responsive to these overwhelming dimensions.66 And then? In other words, how can this utopia be squared with the reality of a continuous reluctance of students to engage with law in such an unbounded manner, considering an ever greater pressure from the market for students to leave law school with skills, practical competence and an advanced understanding of numerous, highly specialized fields?67 IV. The Lawyer: Trained How, Serving Whom? Dire job prospects, rising student debt, graduates insufficiently trained for legal practice? What should be the goal of reform in light of these contentions? Legal education reform has long been on the minds of law school deans, bar associations and judges, while students everywhere are joining the debates as both “victims” and “consumers”.68 Meanwhile, the logic of the market appears to drive the debate, as the trade-offs between a 59 US President Obama has endorsed the idea of a two-year law degree; see Colleen Flaherty, “2 years for law school?”, Inside Higher Ed (26 August 2013), online: IHE . 60 Robert W Gordon, “Undoing Historical Injustice” in Austin Sarat & Thomas R Kearns, eds, Justice and Injustice in Law and Legal Theory (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999) 35; Richard M Buxbaum, “From Paris to London: The Legal History of European Reparation Claims 1946–1953” (2012), online: SelectedWorks [unpublished]. 61 Michal Alberstein, “ADR and Transitional Justice as Reconstructing the Rule of Law” [2011] J Disp Resol 127. 62 Anurug Chagma, “Alternative Dispute Resolution under Labor Law in Bangladesh” (30 June 2012), online: Social Science Research Network . 63 Robert H Mnookin & Lewis Kornhauser, “Bargaining in the Shadow of the Law: The Case of Divorce” (1979) 88 Yale LJ 950; Amy J Cohen, “The Family, the Market, and ADR” [2011] J Disp Resol 91. 64 Yves Dezalay & Bryant G Garth, Dealing in Virtue: International Commercial Arbitration and the Construction of a Transnational Legal Order (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996). 65 Matt James, “A Carnival of Truth? Knowledge, Ignorance and the Canadian Truth and Reconciliation Commission” (2012) 6 International Journal of Transitional Justice 182. 66 Hazel Genn, “Why the Privatisation of Civil Justice is a Rule of Law Issue” (36th FA Mann Lecture, delivered at Lincoln’s Inn, London, UK, 19 November 2012), online: University College London . 67 Lincoln Caplan, “An existential crisis for law schools”, The New York Times (14 July 2012) SR10, online: NYT ; Paul M Barrett, “The case against law school”, Bloomberg Business Week (1 April 2013), online: BBW ; Eric Posner, “The real problem with law schools. They train too many lawyers”, Slate (2 April 2013), online: Slate . 68 See the comprehensive data in the 2012 Law School Survey of Student Engagement Report, “Lessons from Law Students on Legal Education”, online: LSSSE (with an intriguing foreword by UC Irvine’s Dean, Erwin Chemerinsky, “The Benefits of Knowledge”, ibid. at 4, highlighting the crucial role played by experiential learning as part of law students’ education). In this vein, see also Sossin,

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two- or three-year JD programme are weighed against the background of skyrocketing fees and decreasing salary expectations.69 What is the nature of the problem we are facing? What, in other words, can explain the disconnect between the increased frustration with a market-driven legal education system on the one hand, and the growing excitement about law’s interdisciplinarity and lawyers’ engagement with historians, ethnographers and activists, on the other? If the latter suggests the need to take a closer look at the complexity of law and its explanatory value in a transnationalizing society, how can this be made compatible with a debate around two or three years of legal education? The key to the answer might be found by bringing the aspects of legal theory and legal practice closer together. In this vein, let us return to some of the other examples offered in the beginning. By now, the steps of inquiry suggested here, running through the sequence of (1) question, (2) assumption, (3) association and (4) utopia, are familiar enough to allow us to see that the distance between the first three steps and the last is indeed much smaller than first thought. We can already recognize that the established ways of not associating the mentioned non-cases with a particular, neatly circumscribed legal ‘field’ are intimately tied to a denial of utopia. In other words, it is not that the utopian lawyer pushes against the citadel of a selfassured, parochial doctrinal framework in the name of an as-yet impossible, unthinkable, out-of-the-world legal imagination. Rather, it is that the line-drawing, which is done through the identification of what belongs to a legal ‘field’ and what falls through the cracks of all legal (doctrinal) fields, denies any such utopia from the start by establishing an entire universe of self-sufficient legal reproduction.70 Even if we can well remember how environmental law had to break through the shell of tort law in order to develop legal concepts and instruments that would be adequate to the emerging risk-society, we still tend to treat both ‘tort law’ and ‘environmental law’ as legal fields that correspond to a number of courses in any school’s curriculum and which, more importantly, capture the ways in which law deals with a particular segment of societal activity and conflict. What fades into the background is the struggle over the stakes of law’s engagement with a reality that is never just ‘found’, but always constructed. Because tort law has a relatively long history in both legal practice and education, it is not often presented to students as the subject of conceptual, let alone political reform. Of course, we all know that ‘tort law reform’ touches on sensitive areas of market organization and power asymmetries in advanced post-industrial societies,71 but how effective are we really at involving students in the classroom in an engaged reflection on these changing contours of a legal field, which they learn through a cascade of condensed cases and interspersed case-book presentations of ‘Notes and Questions’? Do we do enough to train our students to feel comfortable in their roles as stakeholders in a continuing debate over the aims and outcomes of legal fields? How can we train them even better to understand tort law ‘in context’, which today means including more than a superficial introduction to the changing dimensions of post-industrial, globally integrated markets, the proliferation of expert standard making and the correlating pressure on public oversight – in short, to the realities of globalized market organization today? It would be against this background that students would come to appreciate the stakes involved in imagining, creating and developing a new field – for example, environmental law. While similar contentions can be made for the development of, say, internet law or, more recently, transitional justice,72 the question remains how best to give students even a hint of such challenges during their legal classroom education. How, indeed, could we train students to understand and to assume their roles as ‘game changers’, as agents of change and critical

supra note 52. See also Luis Fernando Perez Hurtado, “Transnationalizing Mexican Legal Education: But, What About Students’ Expectations?” (2009) 10 German Law Journal 767. 69 Daniel B Rodriguez & Samuel Estreicher, “Make law schools earn a third year”, The New York Times (17 January 2013) A27, online: NYT . 70 See e.g. Peer Zumbansen, “The Politics of Relevance: Law, Translation and Alternative Knowledges” (2013) Osgoode Hall Law School Comparative Research in Law & Political Economy Research Paper No. 45/2013, online: Social Science Research Network . 71 Martin F Grace & J Tyler Leverty, “How Tort Reform Affects Insurance Markets” (2012) 29 JL Econ & Org 1253; see especially Patricia M Danzon, “Tort Reform and the Role of Government in Private Insurance Markets” (1984) 13 J Legal Stud 517. 72 See Nagy, supra note 58.

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reflection, when it comes to breaking down barriers between neatly contained ‘fields’ of reality control73 as well as between such legal fields and different disciplinary demarcations of meaning? Question: Returning to the example of the tension between the US Supreme Court’s struggle with same-sex marriage (as well as with federalism, equal protection and standing of non-state parties to argue the constitutionality of a public statute) and Walmart, a company of leviathan dimensions that chooses to create a self-binding norm, we are prompted to ask how the law is to treat this constellation. On the face of it, the question seems to be about the nature of this self-binding commitment on the part of the company. We ask whether what Walmart does should be considered ‘law’ or, at least, as something comparable to a legal norm. Much seems to speak against it, but perhaps not everything. The fact that Walmart is not a democratically elected body with the authority to create law points to the company’s declaration as having no legal significance – at least from a public law perspective. But, what becomes of the allegedly ‘private’ nature of Walmart, if we take into consideration its far-reaching impact on the employment, financial security, health and welfare of its millions of workers? Echoing longstanding debates74 around the foundations and scope of ‘corporate social responsibility’ (CSR),75 Adolf Berle already in 1954 masterfully deconstructed the mythology of corporations’ private nature.76 More recently, scholars have continued the investigation into the grey areas between public and private regulation, finding that much of CSR occurs through an interaction between state and market actors.77 Recent years have seen the increasing proliferation of private and hybrid – that is, public-private – norm generation in areas ranging from environmental self-regulation,78 accounting79 and commercial rule-making80 to labour law81 and corporate governance.82 Against this background, what really tells us that Walmart cannot be a ‘law maker’ of sorts? If that were indeed the case, we would possibly have to regard the company’s declaration of extending health benefits to same-sex partners of its employees as a ‘health care measure’. What are the stakes of such a development? The answer seems to depend on the perspective: emphasizing the ‘adaptation’ of a private actor to changes in the law – here in the form of a Supreme Court ruling that does not directly bind the company – would lead us to welcome this act as one of unmandated compliance. Focusing, however, on the legitimacy grounds of Walmart’s action, we have to remain sceptical about the precarious state of those receiving and the power stance of those who are giving – a grave asymmetry at best.83

73 See the inspiring comments by Rama Mani, “Dilemmas of Expanding Transitional Justice, or Forging the Nexus between Transitional Justice and Development” (2008) 2 International Journal of Transitional Justice 253. 74 Osmond Fraenkel, ed, The Curse of Bigness: Miscellaneous Papers of Louis D Brandeis, arranged by Clarence M Lewis (New York: Viking, 1934); Bert S Prunty Jr, “Love and the Business Corporation” (1960) 46 Va L Rev 467. 75 For insightful treatments of the history, see e.g. Andrew Crane, Dirk Matten & Jeremy Moon, Corporations and Citizenship (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2008), and John Ruggie, Just Business: Multinational Corporations and Human Rights (New York: WW Norton, 2013). 76 AA Berle, The 20th Century Capitalist Revolution (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1954), in particular the chapter on “The City of God”. 77 David Vogel, “The Private Regulation of Global Corporate Conduct” in Walter Mattli & Ngaire Woods, eds, The Politics of Global Regulation (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009) 151; Benedict Sheehy, “Understanding CSR: An Empirical Study of Private Self-Regulation” (2012) 38 Monash UL Rev 103. 78 Sheehy, ibid.; Errol Meidinger, “The Administrative Law of Global Private-Public Regulation: The Case of Forestry” (2006) 17 EJIL 47. 79 Dieter Kerwer, “Rules that Many Use: Standards and Global Regulation” (2005) 18 Governance 611. 80 Gral-Peter Calliess, “Lex Mercatoria: A Reflexive Law Guide To An Autonomous Legal System” (2001) 2:17 German Law Journal, online: . 81 HW Arthurs, “Labour Law without the State” (1996) 46 UTLJ 1; Kevin Kolben, “Transnational Labor Regulation and the Limits of Governance” (2011) 12 Theor Inq L 403. 82 Peer Zumbansen, “Neither ‘Public’ nor ‘Private’, ‘National’ nor ‘International’: Transnational Corporate Governance from a Legal Pluralist Perspective” (2011) 38 JL & Soc’y 50. 83 In this vein, see Harry Arthurs, “‘Private Ordering and Workers’ Rights in the Global Economy: Corporate Codes of Conduct as a Regime of Labour Market Regulation” in Joanne Conaghan, Richard Michael Fischl and Karl Klare, eds, Labour Law in an Era of Globalization. Transformative Practices and Possibilities (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004) 471; Adelle Blackett, “Global Governance, Legal Pluralism and the Decentered State: A Labor Law Critique of Codes of Corporate Conduct” (2001) 8 Ind J Global Legal Stud 401.

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What a frustrating insight after the initial excitement over a corporate giant that cared to put in place rules which could potentially benefit its employees – and certain of the company’s stakeholders – without being legally obligated to do so. The contextualization of such an act, however, revealed that we have to consider the bigger picture of companies that engage in comparable CSR initiatives without at the same time becoming accountable under compliance regimes enforceable by the state. While here, too, much is changing,84 the trick is not only to acknowledge the fuzziness of the boundaries separating state and market but, moreover, to complement such conceptual considerations with sustained empirical research and data gathering.85 The task, altogether, is to unfold this ‘bigger picture’ as well as its consequences in the classroom and underscore the conceptual and educational synergies that characterize a well-designed curriculum – one that is based on a thorough engagement with the changes in legal theory and legal practice and an awareness of the crucial role to be played by experiential learning in the context of cutting-edge theory training. V. Tracing, Placing Our Footsteps: Cautiously, Boldly Assumption: Let us take a few steps back in order to catch our breath, hopefully to become able to gain some historical perspective on the way in which lawyers have been addressing the space between case and ‘cases’ as well as the boundaries between purportedly distinct legal ‘fields’. How far back should we look? Starting in the 1950s, we see a fascinating acceleration of events and concepts. While the European and American postWorld War II reconstruction was at first able to cover up, however partially, the deep-running societal conflicts that had plagued the fast industrializing, militarizing and commercializing Western societies since the late eighteenth century,86 the dream of ‘the affluent society’ was but short-lived and harshly discriminatory.87 And, yet, during and immediately after events as outrageous as, say, the witch hunt conducted by Senator McCarthy, the legal imagination was intrigued by two extremely far-sighted observations. Fortuitously shortcircuiting the worlds of the ‘domestic’ and the ‘international’, Philip Jessup in his Storrs Lectures at Yale Law School alluded to the parallels between the legal organizational and normative character of a large (domestic) business corporation on the one hand and an (international) organization on the other.88 He highlighted the fact that large corporations in the economically flourishing Western capitalist world frequently grew to such enormous proportions that power conflicts between a company’s hundreds of thousands of shareholders and employees and its management should really be seen as comparable with the political sovereignty disputes 84 See e.g. David Scheffer & Caroline Kaeb, “The Five Levels of CSR Compliance: The Resiliency of Corporate Liability under the Alien Tort Statute and the Case for a Counterattack Strategy in Compliance Theory” (2011) 29 Berkeley J Int’l L 334. See also the European Parliament, Texts Adopted (6 February 2013), Resolution on Corporate Social Responsibility: Accountable, Transparent and Responsible Business Behaviour and Sustainable Growth (P7_ TA(2013)0049, online: EP . 85 Sheehy, supra note 77; this is emphasized as well by Abbott & Snidal, supra note 15; Kenneth W Abbott, “Engaging the Public and the Private in Global Sustainability Governance” (2012) 88 International Affairs 543; C Scott, “Reflexive Governance, Meta-Regulation and Corporate Social Responsibility: The ‘Heineken Effect’” in Nina Boeger, Rachel Murray & Charlotte Villiers, eds, Perspectives on Corporate Social Responsibility (Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar, 2008) 170. 86 See the fascinating portrait of the consequences of this development at the turn from the nineteenth to the twentieth century in Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities, translated by Sophie Wilkins (New York: Alfred A Knopf, 1995) [from the original German edition in 3 vols, Rowohlt, 1930–1943]. 87 John Kenneth Galbraith, The Affluent Society (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1958); Brown v Board of Education, 347 US 483, 74 S Ct 686 (1954); Joe R Feagin & Bernice McNair Barnett, “Success and Failure: How Systemic Racism Trumped the Brown v Board of Education Decision” (2004) U Ill L Rev 1099. 88 Philip C Jessup, Transnational Law (New Haven, Conn: Yale University Press, 1956); for a more extensive discussion, see e.g. Christian Tietje, Alan Brouder & Karsten Nowrot, eds, Philip C Jessup’s Transnational Law Revisited: On the Occasion of the 50th Anniversary of its Publication, Essays in Transnational Law No 50/2006 (Haale: Institute for Economic Law, Faculty of Law, Martin-Luther-University Halle-Wittenberg, 2006), online: Institut für Wirtschaftsrecht, Martin-Luther-Universität Halle Wittenberg ; Peer Zumbansen, “Transnational Law, Evolving” in JM Smits, ed, Elgar Encyclopedia of Comparative Law, 2d ed (Edward Elgar, 2012) 898.

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between nation-states. Following from this observation, Jessup pointed to the questionable basis on which lawyers tend to readily identify the company as a private, but the international organization as a public entity. Having learned his lesson from the previous decades of legal and social theory’s developing interest in empirical data as essential to the legal enterprise,89 Jessup had good reasons to make a functional argument through which we learn the name and nature of the beast before us.90 Be it Tiger, Lion or Dragon (thus, not an animal per se, but a fairy-tale creature), they are all dangerous, regardless of their name. A year earlier, one of American corporate legal theory’s poster children,91 Adolf Berle, penned the chapter alluded to above on the ‘city of god’, in which he depicted the domestic and global dimension of business firms as ‘quasi-public’. This little book, which, like Jessup’s lectures two years later, was first presented as part of the Storrs Lectures at Yale, was met with great interest among lawyers informed by social theory and political scientists, but fell flat with that strand of the ‘law and society’ surge that would ultimately prove to be its most successful prodigy. The ‘law and economics’ school that soon spread like wildfire around law schools and policy-making institutions and think tanks across the US and eventually the Western world92 had little sympathy for the ‘re-embedding’ of the firm93 and for the contextualizing of business enterprises in a heavily regulated welfare state.94 Instead, the declared goal was one of remembering Hayek’s 1944 epistle on ‘The Road to Serfdom’,95 while forgetting Polanyi’s ‘Great Transformation’, written the same year.96 Meanwhile, Jessup and Berle are important reminders of a strand of legal thinking that was always acutely aware of the ‘bigger picture’, of the precariousness of a normative order and of the false promises of a legal universe which is constantly being woven and rewoven through abstract principles against ideological smoke-screens, but inherently built on the suppressed or ignored empirical data of a different, conflictual social reality.97 The interest jurisprudes in Berlin,98 the legal realists in New York and California,99 the legal anthropologists and sociologists in Vienna, Madison and Cambridge had persistently pointed out the need to empirically ground and test all legal assertions.100 But, ‘law and society’ evolved as one thing, while ‘law and economics’ evolved as another – quite another indeed.101 Despite all this, our students, burdened with college and graduate school debt and painfully aware of dwindling job opportunities, rightly demand to be well-trained. Given the background described here, it is clear that we should give them what they are asking for. But, there is little time, three years on average, maybe

 89 John Dewey, “The Historic Background of Corporate Legal Personality” (1926) 35 Yale LJ 655.  90 For a similar argument on adapting modern administrative law to complex societal demands, see John Willis, “Three Approaches to Administrative Law: The Judicial, the Conceptual, and the Functional” (1935) 1 UTLJ 53.  91 Adolf A Berle Jr & Gardiner C Means, The Modern Corporation and Private Property (London: Transaction Publishers, 1991) [first published 1932].  92 Brian R Cheffins, “The Trajectory of (Corporate Law) Scholarship” (2004) 63 Cambridge LJ 456.  93 See e.g. Cynthia A Williams & Peer Zumbansen, “Introduction: Corporate Governance after the ‘End of History’: Investigating the New ‘Great Transformation’” in Cynthia A Williams & Peer Zumbansen, eds, The Embedded Firm: Corporate Governance, Labor, and Finance Capitalism (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 1–12.  94 Detlev F Vagts, “Reforming the ‘Modern Corporation’: Perspectives from the German” (1966) 80 Harv L Rev 23; Katharina Pistor, “Codetermination: A Sociopolitical Model with Governance Externalities” in Margaret M Blair & Mark J Roe, eds, Employees and Corporate Governance (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 1999) 163; John W Cioffi, Public Law and Private Power: Corporate Governance Reform in the Age of Finance Capitalism (Cornell University Press, 2010).  95 See also Hayek, supra note 9.  96 Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation. The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time (Boston: Beacon Press, 1944).  97 David Campbell, “The End of Posnerian Law and Economics” (2010) 73 Mod L Rev 305; Macaulay, supra note 10; Ellickson, supra note 10.  98 For a recent assessment, see Remus Titiriga, “The ‘Jurisprudence of Interests’ (Interessenjurisprudenz) from Germany: History, Accomplishments, Evaluation” (2013) 3:1 International Journal of Law, Language & Discourse 55.  99 Joseph William Singer, “Legal Realism Now” (1988) 76 Cal L Rev 465. 100 Sally Engle Merry, “Anthropology, Law, and Transnational Processes” (1992) 21 Annual Review of Anthropology 357. 101 Eve Darian-Smith, Laws and Societies in Global Contexts. Contemporary Approaches (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013).

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less, to train the – critical,102 skilled,103 ethical104 and, yes, transnational105 – lawyer. Train her how? And for what? The litany of more than 150 years of legal education reform is not something that today’s students are usually aware of, nor would they be very interested if they were. But, really, why should they be? As long as we continue to feed them cases, ‘notes and questions’, as if most of the law were ‘business as usual’, interspersed infrequently with a shy glance at recent developments, it is unlikely that we can really fruitfully build on and transform the ‘case method’ – and no one can say we haven’t been trying.106 So, why should students care, if most of us don’t (really, as in ‘seriously’) care? In a strange zone of consciousness (and, admittedly, shrewd and ultimately unsatisfying self-righteousness), one may at times dwell on Holmes’s comment that a law student may still hope to ‘connect your subject with the universe and catch an echo of the infinite, a glimpse of its unfathomable process, a hint of the universal law’.107 So, maybe then, one turns to privatize such endeavours and begins to treat them as luxuries that can at best be enjoyed on those quiet, rainy Sunday afternoons (that never in fact arrive), during which the imagination should be nourished so that we may hope to finally inspire the students who have been waiting too long already. Meanwhile, the school’s administration recruits once more a ‘moderator’ and ‘team leader’ to guide a largely under-researched brainstorming session on ‘what is wrong with legal education’. (Were it not for the reference to Llewellyn,108 we might just too quickly believe we ‘discovered’ this problem.) We listen, more or less attentively, and try not to get too distracted by the moderator’s irritating use of jargon that, in the end, must fail to sweeten the sour taste of our realization that sessions like this cannot be the right way to get the ‘bigger picture’ back into the classroom. They are too focused on ‘engaging’ students but too little on facilitating a discussion among instructors of the larger goals of such engagement. While they tend to emphasize the need to use a variety of digital media to make the material more ‘accessible’ to today’s law school audience in an overly self-serving manner, they fail to discuss the substantive dimensions of the ‘digital classroom’. The latter include the deeper concerns regarding decreasing opportunities to read and discuss overarching, systematic and foundational materials in class – something that should be at the core of ‘skills training’ and of preparing lawyers for practice. So, it’s mostly back to business as usual. The binder with the ‘materials’ from the faculty day on legal education, use of electronics in the classroom and, yes, of course, on ways to internationalize the law school, goes on the shelf, where it shall stay until one rainy day. And, all the while, one always finds a few students who are eager to meet for regular explorations of the books and discussions that – let’s admit it – first got us excited about the law. Too seldom do such reading circles expand beyond a faculty convenor and students to include other colleagues. Where are they? What, then, is to become of our excitement over the prospects of possibly doing it all differently, with new knowledge, methods and fresh energy? What follows after our being intrigued by ideas of teaching the law through business-school-like case studies? Where will we store the newspaper clippings we keep on collecting throughout the semester in the hopes of finding a good moment to build an entire syllabus around the stories that arise from these snippets? And, what should we do with them? Case- and problem-oriented legal education, complemented by some basic bigger-picture sketching by way of history, theory and political economy, could very well be a promising approach. It could be a way 102 Elizabeth Mertz, The Language of Law School: Learning to “Think Like a Lawyer” (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). 103 National Institute for Trial Advocacy, “The Future of Legal Education: A Skills Continuum” (20 October 2009) White Paper Prepared by the National Institute for Trial Advocacy, online: University of Southern California Gould School of Law . 104 Trevor CW Farrow, “Sustainable Professionalism” (2008) 46 Osgoode Hall LJ 51. 105 Bryant G Garth, “Introduction: Taking New Legal Realism to Transnational Issues and Institutions” (2006) 31 Law & Soc Inquiry 939; Jukier, supra note 53; Anita Bernstein, “On Nourishing the Curriculum with a Transnational Law Lagniappe (2006) 56 J Legal Educ 578; Gerald Torres, “Integrating Transnational Legal Perspectives Into the First Year Curriculum” (2005) 23 Penn State International Law Review 801. 106 K Llewellyn, The Bramble Bush: Some Lectures on Law and Its Study (New York: Oceana Publishing, 1950) [first published 1930]; Myron Moskovitz, “Beyond the Case Method: It’s Time to Teach with Problems” (1992) 42 J Legal Educ 241. 107 OW Holmes, “The Path of the Law” (1897) 10 Harv L Rev 457 at 478. 108 KN Llewellyn, “On What is Wrong with So-Called Legal Education” (1935) 35 Colum L Rev 651.

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to effectively invite the students to think about what makes a case – in other words, it could be a method of replacing the ‘teaching’ of four to five cases per class unit by a different kind of instruction. After presenting the outlines of a typical conflict and its prima facie rendering through a legal lens, we could engage the students in an exercise of unpacking the choice and interpretation of facts that resulted in the legal reconstruction of the original conflict, problem, event. In a next step, we would have to trace the way in which the different parties engaged – successfully? – in formulating and mobilizing arguments. Following a (Legal Realist) analysis of what was actually said and conveyed beyond and beneath the words spoken by the parties, we would have to take a step back and appreciate how little of the context in which the ‘case’ is situated has in fact so far become tangible. Trying to understand the ‘time’ and the ‘place’ and ‘space’ of the case, we are likely to discover previously hidden layers of social interaction, circumstance and coincidences, longstanding practices as well as entrenched positions from which stakeholders operate – which were invisible before. We will be confronted with the problem that our depiction of what is ‘relevant’ and what isn’t is, ultimately, based on choice. The complex nature of understanding a case109 in this light is only rarely discussed in class. The conclusive depiction of a conflict, dispute or problem in the language of a legal decision has already superseded the underlying choices.110 The task for the classroom seems to be to slow down this appropriation of reality by unfolding the space in which a lawyer will actually operate – most often with the goal of never going before court and, even less, having to anxiously await ‘what the courts will do in fact’. It is in this sphere between context and case that students will actually have to begin to think like a lawyer, that is, like someone who is in charge of and responsible and accountable for the way in which facts get selected and organized, weighed, highlighted or discarded. In fact, we ought to try to involve them in a discussion which is much more akin to what most of our graduates will do in practice, namely, identify leads, pick out and justify relevant facts, construct a narrative, strategize and, along the entire way, make hard choices. Reading cases and testing students on holdings and principles is – despite our self-congratulatory claims of how ‘passé’ we think Langdell supposedly is – still the way we continue to teach them. Today’s curricula are painfully divided between case-method instruction (requiring above all a master-mind in extracting, organizing and administering a maze of new information) and increasing surges in experiential training. The relevant/irrelevant divide we just identified for cases, and for the cases beneath and around them, in the usual context of law school education, mostly unfolds with a view to domestic law. But, the challenge identified here – to make students aware of the context in which law separates relevant from irrelevant facts, demarcates interests and ranks, prioritizes and selects values – presents itself in an even more striking way in the transnational problem-examples we referred to above. Is the case of the Muslim prayer in Berlin a ‘domestic’ one? Does it have any relevance from a transnational perspective? Would it be helpful for a student (in a German law school) to study this case along with the 2009 referendum in Switzerland over the rights of Muslim religious groups to erect minarets? Is it connected to challenges arising before French courts regarding Muslim parents asking that their schoolchildren be exempted from co-educational physical education? What would the course be in which one could make all these connections? ‘Transnational Constitutional Law’? Would the ‘constitutional law’ framework be enough to capture the other dimensions of these cases? In order to understand the legal challenges that arise from increasingly complex, pluralist, transnational societies, is it enough to study a series of court decisions from this or that jurisdiction? Would we not have to look at developments going on within social communities in terms of self-organization and positioning? Would we not be well- advised to study the emergence of religious freedom rights ‘from the ground up’, in order to avoid applying yesterday’s law to today’s changed world?111

109 See e.g. Sheila Jasanoff, Science at the Bar: Law, Science, and Technology in America (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1997). 110 B Cardozo, The Nature of the Judicial Process (New Haven, Conn: Yale University Press, 1976) [first published 1921]; Niklas Luhmann, “‘Was ist der Fall?’ und ‘Was steckt dahinter?’ Die zwei Soziologien und die Gesellschaftstheorie” (1993) 22 Zeitschrift für Soziologie 245. 111 For an introduction of such perspectives, see William Twining, Human Rights, Southern Voices. Francis Deng, Abdullahi An-Na’im, Yash Ghai and Upendra Baxi (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2009). See also Lucinda J Peach, Legislating Morality: Pluralism and Religious Identity in Lawmaking (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002); Richard Moon, ed, Law and Religious Pluralism in Canada (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2008);

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With a view of the wide-ranging field of transnational human rights litigation,112 what lessons does the Kiobel case hold for students not enrolled in either ‘International Human Rights’ or ‘Conflict of Laws’?113 Would it be helpful, perhaps even important, for first-year students in Tort Law to study such a case?114 What could the effect be of introducing students to the potential use of tort law in such a context? How helpful would it be to draw out the many different legal fields that are in fact at work in cases such as Kiobel? To the degree that we see tort, contract, labour, constitutional law, human rights and conflict of laws at work, where in today’s law school curriculum would be the adequate place to draw out these dimensions, so that a graduating student employed in a law firm representing one of the defendants (or plaintiffs) would know ‘where to start’ in order to advise the senior partner on ‘what the law is’, after the (defendant) client calls to seek help ‘to make this problem go away’, or, alternatively, the (plaintiff) group stating that they ‘have tried everything’ and don’t know what to do now?115 Would the solution be a ‘new’ course? A course in what? And where should it be placed in the curriculum? And who should ideally teach the course? Could the solution be ‘collaborative’ teaching? Could it be that teachers in different areas (contracts, torts, criminal, property law) are asked to sit down together with international lawyers, human rights activists, advocacy group lawyers, etc. to compare and rethink our course programmes? Imagine that! Could it be that professors have to begin to speak to each other? To discuss what we have been doing all along, and how? Could it be that we ourselves, and not a moderator, have to share our research with each other in order to facilitate a real discussion over what is out there and how it can be brought to bear on what we will do in our courses and seminars once the new term rolls around? Could it be that we have to start coming more often to our office, actually spend time there and eventually run into our colleagues, perhaps even in such a clumsy way in the hallway that we make them drop their papers, one of which might be one they were just reading. We could say, ‘What are you reading?’ And we could just see the magic unfold from there.

Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na’im, “The Compatibility Dialectic: Mediating the Legitimate Coexistence of Islamic Law and State Law” (2010) 73 Mod L Rev 1. 112 Craig Scott, “Introduction to Torture as Tort: From Sudan to Canada to Somalia” in Craig Scott, ed, Torture as Tort (Oxford: Hart, 2001) 3; Peer Zumbansen, “Beyond Territoriality: The Case of Transnational Human Rights Litigation” [2005] ConWEB Paper 4, online: Fakultät Wirtschafts- und Sozialwissenschaften, Universität Hamburg . 113 Burt Neuborne, “Some Quick Thoughts on Transnational Human Rights Litigation in American Courts after Kiobel”, Blog Post, New York University Journal of International Law & Politics Online Forum (19 April 2013), online: NYU JILP . 114 Craig Scott, “Translating Torture into Transnational Tort: Conceptual Divides in the Debate on Corporate Accountability for Human Rights Harms” in Craig Scott, ed, Torture as Tort: Comparative Perspectives on the Development of Transnational Human Rights Litigation (Oxford: Hart, 2001) 45. 115 Richard Meeran, “Tort Litigation against Multinational Corporations for Violation of Human Rights: An Overview of the Position Outside the United States” (2011) 3 City University of Hong Kong Law Review 1.

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Index Note: author names follow the form found most frequently in the text with respect to capitalization and placement of particles such as ‘von’. To avoid conflating concepts which are overlapping rather than synonymous, terminology normally follows that preferred by individual contributors.

Abbott, Andrew 63n15, 64n7 Adler, Emanuel 163 Adler, Emanuel and Vincent Pouliot 165 administrative law: see global administrative law Alexander, Larry 76n32 Alexie, Robert Arthur 26 Alliot, M 116, 129 alternative dispute settlement 35, 116, 117, 137n16, 191, 192–3, 202, 219, 222 Antaki, Mark 105–13 Aquinas, Thomas 110 Arendt, Hannah 108, 111 Arthurs, Harry W 168, 195, 200, 202–3, 204, 208, 210–11, 221, 224 Assier-Andrieu, Louis 83–103, 116–17 Austin, John 12nn18 and 19, 17, 56n105, 57n110 authority/authorities codification, effect 149–51 correlativity/personality and 36 custom (including case-law approach) 143–4 customary law, need for endorsement 143–4 decline of the nation-state, effect 61 doctrinal scholarship and 61–9, 71–2, 80 authority vs enquiry paradigm 66 droit savant and 143–4, 146, 147–9 fragmentation of society and 136–7, 140–41 Friedman on 94 human rights 67n38 law/judicial reasoning as 49, 50, 51–2 legal science 144, 147–9, 155: see also legal science/ science du droit legitimacy of the law, dependence on 135 lex and 40–41 multiple sources/authorities: see multiple sources/ authorities non-state entities 133, 137–8, 141–2, 224–5 norm-application vs norm-alteration 73–6 normative social practices and 63 past-based nature of law and 56 professionalization/certified expertise 63–4 religion/the Church 143–6: see also religion/the Church as source of law/legal system soft law 141, 150–51, 201–2 spiritual vs temporal authority 107

state of nature and 36 as state-related concept 98–9, 101, 109–10, 133 autonomy of the law as academic discipline 44–53: see also classical formalism/doctrinalism; interdisciplinary relationship with social sciences; legal realism autopoiesis 59 n121, 99, 134–5 autorité de la raison/principle of reason 54–5, 57, 109, 112, 145, 146, 148, 151–6 Barnhizer, David 164, 165, 166, 167, 170, 173 Barton, Thomas D 204, 209 Belley, Jean-Guy 116, 118, 120, 124, 128–9, 202 Bentham, Jeremy 17, 176 Bergbohm, Karl 12nn18 and 19 Berger, Klaus Peter 205 Berkowitz, Roger 112 Berle, Adolf A 224, 226 Berman, Harold 101, 168 Berman, Paul Schiff 87, 201, 204, 205 Blackstone, William 10, 14–15, 16–17, 247 Bobbio, Norberto 76n33 Bódig, Mátyás 61–9 Bogdandy, Armin von 44 Bradbury, Steven G 161, 162–3 Bradney, Anthony 47, 66n33 Cain, Maureen 100 Calliess, Gral-Peter 224 Calliess, Gral-Peter and Moritz Renner 137 Carbonnier, Jean 119 Cardozo, Benjamin 30 case-law dynamic nature 56 as method of legal education 167–9, 204n32 syllogistic reasoning and 44–5 categories and classification: see legal categories and normative/cognitive classification Chiappini, Philippe 144n7, 147n21 civil society organizations 3, 133–4, 138, 139, 140, 141 classical formalism/doctrinalism 10, 44–6 autonomous/closed nature 44–5 balancing the equation (rule/exception, precise rule/ imprecise standard) 45–6

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Classical Legal Thought (CLT) 10 description of 44–5 doctrinalism in Europe 44 indeterminacy of legal doctrine 45, 73–4, 116–17, 185 interdisciplinary alternative 46–9, 53: see also interdisciplinary relationship with social sciences legal realism alternative 45–6, 54–6: see also legal realism predictability of the law and 46, 55, 56 revival of US legal formalism 44 Weinrib’s correlativity model as alternative 49–53, 58 Clastres, Pierre 109, 110, 112, 113 codification of the law droit savant and 149, 151–5 European Commission projects 154–5 international consequences 149–51 international examples 151–5 Jewish law 145–6 nihil est sine ratione 112 Restatements of the Law 151–2, 153, 154–5 romanization of the law and 147–8 Cohen, Felix S 45, 46, 54, 55–6 common law[s]: see also ius commune case-law teaching method 169 customary law basis 143–4 dynamic nature 56 Jewish law compared 38–40 legal pluralism and 191 and legal science 10, 11, 14–15, 167, 168–9 and natural law 16 common law of Europe (novum ius commune Europaneum) 194–5 communities of practice (Adler) 163, 166: see also international legal obligation and the practice of legality comparative law benefits 189 as context/opening to other possibilities 58 correlativity/personality and 38 Ireland 194 peripheral nature 194, 197 [comparative] legal history, role as alternative to transsystemic law study 198–9 counterpart to/merger with comparative law 187n2, 191–3 European Society for Comparative Legal History (ESCLH) 199 hybridity and 189–90 obstacles to teaching of 198–9 trans-temporal transnational law 190–93 Constable, Marianne 106n8, 112n69, 113n74 Constant, Benjamin 108 corporate law/governance 128n118, 202, 220–21, 224–6 cosmopolitan jurists 24, 171, 204–5, 211 Cotterrell, Roger 94, 98, 189 Coulon, Christian 112 Cover, Robert M 54, 107, 218

critical thinking as McGill objective definition 205–6 learning bilingually 207 questioning assumptions 207 transcending doctrinal boundaries 208–11 uncovering hidden assumptions 207–8 cultural defence 95–6: see also legal cultures and legal pluralism Cumyn, Michelle 71–80 Curran, Vivian Groswald 197 customary law authority of 143–4 contradictory customs 95–6 customary international law 135 Universal Declaration of Human Rights 4 legal pluralism and (Adat Law School) 116 native customs 99–100 and religion 144 romanization of the law and 147–8 as stateless law 4, 37 status/endorsement as law 11, 83, 84, 88, 124, 129n124, 199 societal/cultural customs 83, 89, 90, 143–4, 202 Dagan, Hanoch 43–60 Daniel, Julie 151 David, René 152–3 Dedek, Helge 9–21, 90, 91n51, 209 Dedek, Helge and Armand de Mestral 112n71, 196, 202, 221 Derrida, Jacques 177–8, 179, 180–81, 182 Dewey, John 45, 54, 56, 226 Dicey, Albert V 10, 12n18, 15–17, 20, 130 discipline: see law as ‘discipline’ doctrinal knowledge 62–4: see also legal [doctrinal] scholarship doctrinalism: see classical formalism/doctrinalism Donlan, Seán Patrick 187–200 Dorsen, Norman 196 droit savant/learned laws: see also autorité de la raison/ principle of reason authority of 143–4, 146, 147–9 codification of the law and 149, 151–5 modern revival 150–51, 152 Drummond, Susan 188 Duck, Arthur 143, 146, 147, 148, 151–2, 156 Dufour, Alfred 143n4, 148 Dumont, Louis 84 Dupret, Baudouin 86, 91, 188 Duxbury, Neil 17, 44–5 Dworkin, Ronald 131n140, 172n120, 218 ecclesiastical law 61n4, 146, 191 economic analysis of law 47, 49 n58, 63 Edwards, Harry T 33, 59, 65, 184n48 Ehrlich, Eugen 116, 120 Elias, Norbert 111–12

Index

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Ellis, Jaye 133–42 Erasmus programme 195 European law (EC/ECHR) codification projects 144–5 novum ius commune Europaneum 195 Evans-Pritchard, EE 4 faculty: see law faculty Fauvarque-Cosson, Bénédicte 153, 154n49, 194 Feldman, Stephen M 46, 47, 64 First Nations laws 4, 195 First Nations residential schools 25–8, 29–30 Fontanelli, Filippo 120 Forray, Vincent 175–85 Foucault, Michel 13, 106, 109, 176n12 Friedman, Lawrence M 84, 91, 94–5 Fuller, Lon 106, 129, 130, 164–5, 167 Gardner, John 72, 73, 75 Garth, Bryant G 91n56, 227 Geertz, Clifford 92–3, 98 Germany legal science in 10, 12, 17–19 positivism–nation-state relationship 11 n12, 19–21 Gernet, Louis 101 Gierke, Otto von 124 Girard, Philip 199 Girard, Philip and Jim Phillips 199 Glendon, Mary Ann 168, 197 Glenn, H Patrick 72, 100–101, 164, 165n59, 166n62, 192n24, 216 global administrative law 142, 224 globalization of CLT 10 decline of nation-state 9 stateless law as reflection of 40, 110, 111 Golde, Chris M 28 Goldman, David 101 Goldsmith, Jack 160n8, 161, 162–3, 173, 217–18 Gordley, James 113n73, 191, 198n63, 199 Graziadei, Michele 191 Green, Leslie 121n49, 129 Grey, Thomas C 44 Griffiths, John 85, 86, 118 Gurvitch, Georges 91, 116, 118, 120, 128n118 Habermas, Jürgen 111, 140–41, 176n6, 217 Hanse Law School 194, 195 Harris, Ron 47 Hart, HLA 16n51, 45, 56, 57n110, 72, 73, 74, 75, 76, 105n4, 117, 118, 119, 123, 126–7, 129–30, 165n59 Hauriou, Maurice 120, 123, 124 Hayek, FA 217, 226 Hegel, GWF 12n18, 122, 183 Heidegger, Martin 106n12, 108, 109n40, 112, 178, 181, 182

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Herder, Johann Gottfried 89, 90, 101n122 Heringa, Aalt Willem 194 hermeneutics 65, 144–5, 149, 156 vs logical empiricism/positivism 71, 72–6 Hespanha, Manuel 189, 190 higher faculties, status as 12, 18 Hinchey, Patricia H 206, 207, 209 historical jurisprudence (Savigny) 18–19 history: see [comparative] legal history, role Hohfeld, Wesley Newcomb 175 Holmes, Oliver Wendell 46, 54, 55, 63n12, 105n4, 106 Horwitz, Morton 44–5 Huizinga, Johan 159, 165 human rights law enforcement 3, 4 as law 3 as supra-state law 4 Husa, Jaakko 189 hybrid legitimacy 141–2 hybridity benefits from an understanding of 189 as characteristic of stateless law 24 and comparative legal history 187–200, 248 histories of hybridity, role 189–90 public-private norm generation 224 indeterminacy of legal doctrine 45, 73–4, 116–17, 185 indexing legal documents 79–80 instrumentalism: see also legal science Blackstone and 15, 16n51 as challenge to legal scholarship/law as discipline 47, 52, 53, 61–3, 65–7 economic analysis of law and 47, 49 n58, 63 judicial justificatory responsibilities and 52–3 legal education methods as contributory factor 169, 172, 173, 183–4 positive law/codification and 150, 159 practice-related knowledge and 63–4 pressure on academic institutions 21, 25, 49 private law, inappropriateness to 49 transsystemic law as protection against 173 interdisciplinary relationship with social sciences 46–8 establishing common territory 83–5 law as parasite 47 ‘no academic core’ 47–8 as response to decline of classical formalism/ doctrinalism 46–9 swallowing of the law 46–7 Weinrib on 49–53 international law civil society access to 133–4 customary international law 4, 135 democratic deficit 133–4 obligatory effect 163: see also international legal obligation and the practice of legality state consent, role 134–6 states as actors and subjects 134

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territorial sovereignty basis 134 international legal obligation and the practice of legality 163–6: see also justificatory coherence and the normative character of the law communities of practice (Adler) 163, 166 interactional theory 164–6 pragmatism 164, 165 US interrogation techniques post-11 September 159–63 internet regulation 87, 88, 134, 223 Islamic law/legal science 87, 91, 92–3, 146 ius vs lex 40–41, 190, 192

Kingsbury, Benedict 136–7, 142 Kjaer, Poul F 136n6, 137, 141–2 Klabbers, Jan 139, 141 Kleinhans, Martha-Marie and Roderick Macdonald 167, 176, 205 Koskenniemi, Martti 49n53, 139, 218n20 Kratochwil, Friedrich V 164, 165 Kreide, Regina 138–9, 140 Kronman, Anthony T 25, 54, 168, 169, 171, 173 Krug, Wilhelm Traugott 18 Kuehn, Thomas 192 Kymlicka, Will 96, 130–31

Janda, Richard 111, 204 Jaspers, Karl 176 Jellinek, Georg 121, 124 Jessup, Philip 225–6 Jewish law/legal science 38–40, 145–6 Jhering, Rudolf von 124 Joerges, Christian 142 Jukier, Rosalie 201–11 Jung, Carl 159, 165 jusnaturalism 116: see also natural law justificatory coherence and the normative character of the law 34, 35–6: see also international legal obligation and the practice of legality correlativity and 49–50, 51 doctrinal knowledge and 62–3 importance to law as academic discipline 43–4 international law rules and 134–5 judicial obligations to society at large 51–3 risks of instrumentalism 52–3 justification as giving of reasons (ratio) 112 realists’ attitude to 55 rise of positivism and 40–41 transsystemic law and 37–8, 159–60 universalizability 56 Jutras, Daniel 183, 201, 202, 204, 206, 216

Lakoff, George 77, 79n47 Lambert, Edouard 144n6, 150–51 Lando, Ole 153–4 Langdell, Christopher C 10, 44, 167–8, 197, 228 law as ‘discipline’ 43–60: see also Germany; Kant on lawyers and their limitations; positive law/ positivism 19th-century university disciplinarity and 9 academic vs apprentice/professional training model 16, 17, 33–4, 183–5 attitudes to law as ‘legal science’ and 10–12: see also legal [doctrinal] scholarship; legal science/science du droit autonomy of the law: see autonomy of the law as academic discipline definitions/etymology 11, 33 disciplinary differentiation and 11–12, 47 identifying the legal proprium 9, 10, 21: see also legal proprium in Germany 17–20 instrumentalism and: see instrumentalism legal theory as core 44, 47–8, 53, 57 non-professional disciplines distinguished 33 positivism/nation-state basis 10, 11–12, 18–19 dependence on/transcendence of state 36–7 in Germany 11 n12, 19–20 sacrifice of natural law discourse 9, 12 state/professional discipline 13–14, 20–21 stateless law as challenge to/opportunity 9, 110–13 law faculty Conflit des facultés 177–80 philosophy’s appropriation of law 179–80 philosophy–law hierarchy 178–9 research project funding 180–81 teaching methods 181–2 ‘university’ 178 university–faculty relationship 178 droit (law) for purposes of 175–7 as institution for developing ‘faculties’ 175 as place/course content/people 24 as a right to enter a faculty (un droit à la faculté) 175–6 lawyers: see also Kant on lawyers and their limitations indirect/intermediary nature of role 140

Kahn, Paul W 47n39, 98–9 Kant on lawyers and their limitations 12, 18, 34–5, 36, 57, 177–83: see also state of nature (Kant) ad hoc vs considered systematic approach 34 inability to distinguish between culpability and punishability 34 substantial and jurisdictional matters 34 iurisconsultus (knowledge of the law) vs iurisperitus (ability to apply the law) 34 law’s claim to ‘higher faculty’ status 12, 18 limitation to positive law/right 18, 34 Kasirer, Nicholas 72n10, 79, 169, 171n114, 195n37, 202n10, 204, 206, 211, 217 Kelsen, Hans 72, 75, 76–7, 78, 106, 115, 120, 123, 124, 125, 127 Kennedy, Duncan 10n10, 93–4, 176n9 Keynes, John Maynard 218 King, Thomas 23

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Index status in society 170–73 learned laws: see droit savant/learned laws legal categories and normative/cognitive classification 76–80 change vs stability 80 definitions 78 functions 78–80 indexing 79–80 legal cultures and legal pluralism 89–102 Bercea 97 Bermand 101 Cain 100 Cotterrell 94, 98 ‘culture’ 89–91 Europe/the West vs the rest 97–9 as imperialist legacy 99–102 Friedman 94–5 Geertz 92–4 Glenn 100–101 Goldman 101 hierarchical ordering 89–90, 115–16, 118 Kahn 98–9 Kennedy 93–4 Lévi-Strauss 100 Llewellyn 101–2 Moore 89 reconciliation of conflicting values 95–6 Savigny 90–91, 93, 94 Tylor 90, 91, 102 van Hoecke and Warrington 97–8 Ward 99 legal [doctrinal] scholarship definition 62 doctrinal knowledge and 62–3 instrumentalist challenge 65–7 interdisciplinary approach 68–9 professionalization/certified expertise and 63–4 legal education: see also law as ‘discipline’; legal [doctrinal] scholarship case-law method 167–9, 204n32 criticisms of 166–70 and the rule of law 170–73 legal obligation: see international legal obligation and the practice of legality legal philosophy, change of status 12, 19 legal pluralism anti-statism and 127, 128–9 challenges to/endorsement of concept 115–32 Assier-Andrieu 116–17 Belley 116, 118, 128 conceptual indeterminacy 116–17 Ehrlich 116 Fuller 129–30 Gurvitch 116 Hart 129–30 Mayer 128 Moret-Bailly 128

235

Tamanaha 117–19, 128–9 Teubner 117–18 Waldron 129–30 common law and 191 customary law and 116 definitions 115–16 ethnological origin 102, 116, 129 globalization and 86 ‘law’/legal system for purposes of Berman 87 Carbonnier 119–20 Ehrlich 86, 116 Falk Moore 85 Griffiths 85, 86 Hart 119 Legendre 88 Malinowski 3–4, 88–9 Romano 120–28 Rouland 116 Santos 117 Tamanaha 86–7, 117–19 legal cultures and: see legal cultures and legal pluralism legal proprium and 117, 147 mediaeval Europe and 86–7 rule of law and 115, 130–31, 132 legal proprium law as ‘discipline’ and 9, 10, 21 legal pluralism and 117, 147 legal realism 45–6, 54–6: see also legal theory balance between power and reason 54–5, 57 rule and exception 45–6 science and craft 55–6, 57 tradition and progress 56, 57 legal theory and 57–60 legal science/science du droit: see also law as ‘discipline’; legal [doctrinal] scholarship Blackstone on 10, 14–15, 16 changes in concept of scientia/Wissenschaft 11–12 common law and 10, 167, 168–9 Dicey on 16 German/English terminology compared 12 in Germany 10, 12, 17–19 hermeneutical approach: see hermeneutics historical jurisprudence (Savigny) and 18–19 instrumentalist pressures 21 Kant on 34 law as discipline and 9–10 legal philosophy as sub-discipline 12, 19 positive law and 18, 71: see also positive law/ positivism Redlich vs Langdell 167 religious origin 144–6, 156 value to practitioner/administrator 10, 20–21 von Liszt on 20 legal theory

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as core identifier of law as discipline 44, 47–8, 53, 57 and legal realism 57–60 Legendre, Pierre 88, 109–10, 185n53 legitimacy of the law, relevant factors autopoiesis 135 political authority 135 ‘publicness’ 136–7 state consent 134–6 Legrand, Pierre 84, 97 Lesaffer, Randall 199 Lévi-Strauss, Claude 100, 177 lex mercatoria 134, 138, 139, 151, 154, 192, 224 Llewellyn, Karl N 45, 54–5, 56, 57, 59, 66n26, 77, 88, 100–102, 167–8, 227 logical empiricism 71, 72–6, 79n47 Luhman, Niklas 59n121, 117, 135, 228 Maastricht University (European Law School) 193–4 McCrudden, Christopher 58n118, 66, 67 Macdonald, Roderick 13, 23, 25, 59, 163n37, 173, 192, 195, 202 Macdonald, Roderick and Jason MacLean 165n54, 169, 171–2, 173, 187n1, 204–5, 217, 218 Macdonald, Roderick and Kate Glover 203, 204 McGill programme: see transsystemic law (McGill Programme) MacIntyre, Alasdair 63 McLaren, J 198 Maharg, Paul 25n8 Maine, Henry Sumner 17, 83, 144n6 Malinowski, Bronislaw 3–4, 88–9, 91, 99–100 Matteuci, Nicola 127–8 Mayer, Pierre 128 mediaeval Europe and legal pluralism 86–7 Melissaris, Emmanuel 119 Menski, Werner 192, 193 Merry, Sally Engle 3–5, 72, 115, 226 Mertz, Elizabeth 57n113, 226–7 Mestral, Armand de 202, 203 Modéer, Kjell Å 177 Montesquieu 83, 103 Moore, Sally Falk 85, 89, 218 Mootz, Francis J 164, 166n62, 168n88, 169n97, 170, 171, 173 Moret-Bailly, Joël 128 Morissette, Yves-Marie 112, 173, 195, 202, 207 multiple sources/authorities 45–6, 57–60, 61, 137, 190–93: see also legal pluralism Nagy, Rosemary L 221, 223 Nancy, Jean-Luc 177, 179–80 nation-state, implications for law/legal education of the rise and fall of 4, 9–10, 11–12, 18–21, 61, 72, 110–11, 118, 136, 202: see also positive law/ positivism natural law common law and 16

in Germany 11n12 ‘jusnaturalism’ 116 legal statism (Romano) as 123–4 vs positive law 9, 12, 18, 72 Nietzsche, Friedrich 113, 180 nomadic dispute settlement 4 norm-application vs norm-alteration 73–6 normative character of private law 35–40 correlative structure 35 correlativity/personality and positive law 36 key elements coherence and rationality 34, 35 personality/capacity for purposive agency 34–6 law as normative ordering of social relations 34 importance of understanding normative ordering 34 law and normative order distinguished 188 Nussbaum, Martha 132 NYU/Washington programmes 196 Oakeshott, Michael 33 Orgad, Liav 96 Osman, Filali 151 pandectism 10, 19 Penner, JE 46, 58 Plato 44, 165 Poirier, René 176 polyjurality: see hybridity; legal pluralism positive law/positivism facets of dependence of law on sources 72 logical empiricism 72–6 relationship with nation-state/national legal systems 9–10, 11–12, 18–20, 72, 112 historicity as source 18–19 and legal science 18, 71 legal and social scientific positivism, relationship 71, 72–4, 76, 112–13 vs natural law 9, 12, 18, 72 norm-application vs norm-alteration 73–6 Posner, Richard A 43, 46–7, 63n13 Postema, Gerald J 53n91, 165, 166 Pound, Roscoe 46, 91n56 predictability of the law 46, 55, 56 Priest, George 47–8 private law: see normative character of private law professionalization/expertise in the law civil society organizations and 133–4, 138, 140, 141 law as ‘discipline’ and 13–14, 20–21 risk of dominating legal scholarship 63–4 Savigny on 90–91, 93–4 Radbruch, Gustav 10, 215, 218 Radin, Max 52–3, 56 Raz, Joseph 53n87, 56n105, 63n14, 72, 74, 75n26, 77 realism: see legal realism

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Index reason: see autorité de la raison/principle of reason reason vs positive law 18 Redlich, Josef 167, 168–9 Reimann, Mathias 17, 19, 152, 197–9 Reimann, Mathias and Alain Levasseur 190, 191 religion/the Church as source of law/legal system 3, 62, 83, 85, 86–7, 91, 99, 124n83, 143–6, 156, 200, 205 Renner, Moritz 136, 137, 139, 142 Restatements of the Law 151–2, 153, 154–5 Ricoeur, Paul 28 Riles, Annelise 189 Robinson, Edward 46 Rodell, Fred 45, 54 Roitman, Janet 4 romanization of the law (17th century Europe) 142, 147–9 customary law and 147–8 Romano, Santi 120–28 Rouland, Norbert 116, 143n3 Rubin, Edward L 52, 66 rule of law and legal education 170–73 legal pluralism and 115, 130–31, 132 normative classifications and 79 Romano and 127, 128 Universal Declaration of Human Rights and 131 St-Hilaire, Maxime 115–32 Saleilles, Raymond 150–51 Samuel, Geoffrey 65, 66, 67, 71n3, 77, 198 Sandulli, Aldo 124, 127–8 Santos, Alvaro 215 Santos, Boaventura de Sousa 25, 117, 217, 218 Savigny, Friedrich Carl von 18–19, 90–91, 93–5, 175 Schauer, Frederick 10, 44, 46, 76n32, 127, 218n20 Schiavone, d’Aldo 101 Schlag, Pierre 204, 209 Schmitt, Carl 106–7, 128, 149, 216–17 Schröder, Jan 12, 18–19 Scott, Colin 216 Scott, Craig 194n32, 196n45, 229 Scott, James C 108 Sebok, Anthony J 44, 73 Serverin, Evelyne 118 Sexton, John Edward 196 Simma, Bruno 218–19 Singer, Joseph William 59, 226 Skinner, Quentin 108 Smith, KJM and JPS McLaren 198 Smith, Stephen A 77, 79, 80, 206n57, 208, 210 Smits, Jan M 191, 194–5 SOAS 193, 195 social sciences and the law: see interdisciplinary relationship with social sciences societal constitution 139, 141–2 soft law 141, 150–51, 201–2 Somek, Alexander 106n5 standards and guidelines 4, 78, 134, 137–8, 141

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state consent, role 134–6 state legal regimes emergence of 4 state sovereignty and 193 state of nature (Kant), normative basis 36–7 stateless law (definitions/classification as): see also transnational law; transsystemic law (examples) alternative dispute settlement 35, 116, 117, 137n16, 191, 192–3, 202, 219, 222 British East India Company law 4 corporate law/governance 128n118, 202, 220–21, 224–6 cosmopolitan law 24 customary law: see customary law ecclesiastical law 61n4, 146, 191 First Nations laws 4, 195 global administrative law 142, 224 harmonization projects/soft-law 201–2 human rights law: see human rights law hybridity 24 international law: see international law internet regulation 87, 88, 134, 223 lex mercatoria 134, 138, 139, 151, 154, 192, 224 special economic zones 4 standards/guidelines 4, 78, 134, 137–8, 141 transnational/multinational company governance 4, 128 n118, 225–6 transsystemic law 37–8, 202–3 UNIDROIT 153–4, 201 Uniform Commercial Code (UCC) 152–3 stateless law (overview) 3–5, 105–13 as challenge to law as university discipline 9 difficulties of conceiving stateless law/law without the state 105–7, 143 ‘how’ vs ‘what’ as focus 24–5, 27–8 interrelationship with state law 3, 4–5 Kant on the ‘state of nature’ 36–7 reciprocity as driving force 3–4 rules and regulations, need for 27–8 social and cultural processes, role 3–4 ‘state’ of the discipline 110–13 ‘state’, evolution of concept 108–10 stateless law sensibility 23, 24, 25, 26–8, 29, 30 stateless/state-bound law, interrelationship 36–7 stewardship responsibility 28–9 stories as teaching aid 23–30 Strauss, Peter L 197 Tamanaha, Brian Z 44, 76, 86–7, 88, 115–20, 128–9, 196 Taylor, Charles 71n2, 73, 76 Teubner, Gunther 117–18, 134, 135, 136, 139, 217 Thompson, EP 131 Tomlins, Christopher 64n19, 97n52 Toope, Stephen J 159–74 torture, US endorsement of post-11 September 159–63: see also justificatory coherence and the normative character of the law trans-temporal transnational law 190–93

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translation of ideas between different legal traditions 208–9 civil society organizations and 140–41 as means of developing the law 24–30 in partnership with judgement and stewardship 24–30 transnational law, factors giving rise to breakdown in distinctions domestic/international 136, 137 public/private 136–7 fragmentation of transnational order 136 incohesion of communities/actors and interests 137 international law’s shortcomings 135–6 multiplication of law-making regimes 137: see also legal pluralism; multiple sources/authorities transnational law, problems posed by de-democratization 138 bureaucracy and technocracy 140, 142 civil society organizations, limitations 140, 141 decision-making by unaccountable international organizations 140 de-juridification 138–9 de-politicization 139 lawyers’ indirect/intermediary role 140–41 separation of powers issues 138–9 societal constitution as solution 139, 141–2 transnational law as stateless/state law 133 legal nature of non-state arrangements 137–8 as soft law 141 transsystemic law, examples: see also stateless law (definitions/classification as) common law/Jewish law 38–40 Europe post-Roman Empire 192–3 European law (EC/ECHR) 195 First Nations/Canadian law 195 transsystemic law (general) Blackstone and 14–15 decoupling of law from the state and 202–3 justificatory coherence and 37–8, 159–60 protection against instrumentalism 173 as stateless law 202–3 transnational law alternative 197–8 transsystemic law (McGill Programme) 201–11, 215–29: see also transsystemic law programmes aims 195, 203–5 inculcating critical thinking 205–11: see also critical thinking as McGill objective evaluation of success 196–7 as integrated exposure to common and civil law 37 as potential model 159 as protection against instrumentalism 173 scope of programme 195, 216–29 First Nations laws 195 plurijuralism 195 social norms 195

transsystemic law programmes: see also transsystemic law (McGill Programme) comparative legal/normative history alternative 198–9 Erasmus 195 Hanse Law School 194, 195 law schools in mixed legal systems 195 n38 Maastricht University (European Law School) 193–4 NYU/Washington programmes 196 peripheral nature (lagniappe) 196–7 SOAS 193, 195 Tsui, Lisa 205–6, 208 Tushnet, Mark 65n21, 66nn26 and 27 Twining, William 55n102, 97, 192n24, 228 Tylor, Edward Burnett 90, 91, 102 Unger, Roberto 21, 45n22, 85n9 UNIDROIT 153–4, 201 Uniform Commercial Code (UCC) 152–3 Universal Declaration of Human Rights 4, 100, 131 USA, legal science in 10 van Erp, Sjef 194 van Hoecke, Mark 65, 76n29, 89n43, 97–8 Van Praagh, Shauna 23–30, 165n54, 208 van Rhee & JAJM van der Meer 194 Vick, Douglas W 43, 66n29, 67 Vico, Giambattista 164, 170, 172 Viellechner, Lars 136, 138–9 Villey, Michel 148n27, 216 von Liszt, Franz 20 Waddams, Stephen 77, 208 Waldron, Jeremy 62n8, 115–16, 129–30, 131n140, 204 Washington Transnational Law Program 196 Watson, Alan 196, 198n62, 199 Weber, Max 83, 96, 109, 110, 112, 145, 168 Weinrib, Ernest J 33–41, 43, 49–53, 58–9, 67 Weinstein, Janet 204, 206n45, 210 Wendel, Bradley 161, 165, 166, 170, 172 Westerman, Pauline 68n42, 77n37 White, James Boyd 24n4, 28–9 Wieacker, Franz 19, 147, 149 Wijffels, Alain 143n2, 147n19, 148n25 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 105, 112 Wolfendale, Jessica 163n36 Xifaras, Mikhail 84, 178 Yoo, John 160–63, 172–3 Zandt, David E Van 48 Zenati-Castaing, Frédéric 72n10, 143–56 Zimmermann, Reinhard 154n49, 195n36, 199n65 Zumbansen, Peer 21n83, 215–29