Contributions of the Law to Political Deliberation. Comments on Peter Fitzpatrick's "Consolations of the Law"

In this paper the author discusses Peter Fitzpatrick's conception of deliberative politics (Fitzpatrick 2001), defining him as both a moderate optimist and a sceptic. For Fitzpatrick the deliberation is a process intrinsically incomplete; the law shows and compensates for the limits of deliberative politics and gives the political decision its legitimate form. Starting from Fitzpatrick's position, the author dwells, in particular, upon the relationship between law and deliberative decision making in politics showing that the essential question is how to handle deliberative discussion and not what the limits that law posits to deliberation are. Therefore he stresses that the success of deliberation depends not only on sound procedure, but, rather on political convictions, the belief in practical reason and a sense of community and proportionality (in other words, the spirit of democratic government and a critical public opinion) which play a decisive role in deliberative processes.     

寻求不一致的一致——试论软法与协商民主机制的结构性耦合

卢曼认为,法律是一个使用合法/不合法的独特符号作为沟通手段的独立的规则系统,是人类行为的规范性预期的制度化。法律规范作为独立系统欲保持稳定与再生则必须在封闭运行的同时与外部环境之间保持认知的开放,其对外部环境刺激的稳定回应模式即为结构性耦合。从此视角观察,软法是一个相对而言制度化程度较低的,其稳定预期的功能相对弱化了的规则系统,它允许中间程度的效力,其创生本身具有回应性目的。软法建构的环境在国际关系和国内民主政治领域的表现形式就是协商民主。协商民主政治机制本身的出现就具有回应民主程度问题的性质,其成功的几个关键机制需要弹性的规范体系。软法能够模式化地回应协商民主的需要而与之形成结构性耦合。     

Affairs of the Heart: Hate Crime and the Politics of Crime Control

Various scholars have noted the priority given to law in the politics of hate violence; violence is the problem and law, more specifically the criminal law, the solution at the ‘heart’ of society. This article seeks to explore some of the gaps and silences in the existing literature and politics that mobilize these ideas and associations. It is the gap sand silences associated with demands for and expectations of criminal justice that will be the particular concern of this article. The demand for law is examined by way of David Garland's recent work on the culture of crime control. His work offers an analysis of the contemporary place of crime control in Anglo-American liberal democracies. A distinctive feature of his analysis is to be found in the way it maps an important paradox of contemporary crime control; its political centrality and an increasing recognition of its limitations. Garland's ‘criminology of the self’ and the ‘criminology of the other’ raise some important challenges for those who advocate resort to crime control. My particular concern is to consider the significance of Garland's work for a contemporary sexual politics that puts violence and criminal justice at the heart of that politics. Feminist, gay and lesbian scholarship first on criminal justice and second, on violence and law will be used to develop a critical dialogue with Garland's analysis and to reflect upon the challenges raised by his insights into contemporary crime control. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Restorative Justice,Policing and Insurgency: Learning from Pakistan

Pakistan state law and Taliban rule of Sharia law are at different ends of a politico‐legal spectrum. They share advocacy of one system of law and attraction to eradication of alternatives. Muslahathi Committees in Pakistan are used to explore legal pluralism, hybrid institutions that allow deliberative democracy to seek workable responses to injustice. Formal and traditional systems can show mutual respect and check each other. On the basis of purely qualitative evidence, it is argued that Muslahathi Committees are restorative justice programs that sustainably reduce revenge violence, make a contribution to preventing Pakistan from spiraling into civil war, and assist a police force with low legitimacy to become somewhat more accountable to local civil society. These contributions are limited, but could be more significant with modest investment in human rights and gender awareness training to control abuses and increase accountability. The ruthless, murderous, divisive politics of policing and restorative justice in Pakistan seems a least likely case for deliberative democracy to work. In limited ways it does.     

Adjudicating the Market

The true governance challenge within Europe remains the resolution of conflict within the Internal Market and the identification of efficacious solutions, to its regulatory and redistributive problems. Absent the legitimising sovereign power once furnished by the national constitutional settlement and without recourse to a pre-political principle of pluralist self-limitation, Europe's law must supply a pluralist and contested internal market polity with authoritative adjudication on the meaning and content of institutions of market governance, including 'law' itself. In the endeavour to 'socialise the market', or to re-establish the determinative links between society, politics, and the market place caste asunder by a rationalising process of European economic integration, Europe's law is seemingly returning—via judicial dialogue between national and European courtrooms—to the ancient legal grammar and semantics of 'reasonableness' and 'equity'. Such an adjudicative return serves: (i) the processing of reasonable pluralism within the market in the light of deliberative values: and (ii), the re-establishment and maintenance of the law's factual (non-natural), logical (internally coherent and impartial) and moral (real-world) legitimacy.     

论协商民主广泛多层制度化发展——从场域理论的视角

协商民主的广泛多层制度化发展是鼓励公众有序政治参与的新形式。它既与中国社会的多样性、复杂性相适应．也与发达国家的代表性理论具有一定的契合性。场域理论为协商民主广泛多层制度化发展提供了新的理论分析视角。本文根据实践场域客观存在的协商民主形式,从协商主体、主题、具体形式、方法、程序等方面对协商民主的广泛多层制度化发展提供经验支持．进而说明这一协商民主形式是当代中国民主政治发展的新观念和新实践。     

论法政治学的创立

法政治学在中国的创立具有现实和学理的双重依据,是历史发展的时代要求。创立法政治学学科的根据,在于法律与政治之间的密切关系,尤其是二者之间的交叉重叠关系。这种关系为法政治学的创立提供了最坚实的基础。本文拟对这一关系予以法政治学视角的初步研究,并进而论证法政治学的学科定位,历史发展和学科意义,以期为中国法政治学的创立,提供最基本的理论解说。     

论国际法的政治基础

国际法与国际政治之间存在一种相互强化和相互渗透的关系。一方面,自国际法产生以来,国际法的发展时常受到国际政治的制约;另一方面,国际法一经确立就对国际政治关系产生重要影响。在未来的国际体系中,国际法将逐步摆脱强权政治的束缚,作用也会更加突出。     

Law's Allure and an Interbranch Perspective on Law and Politics

This essay views Gordon Silverstein's book Law's Allure: How Law Shapes, Constrains, Saves, and Kills Politics (2009) from the perspective of the burgeoning interbranch literature on law and courts, which seeks to place judicial decision making within the context of ongoing political and policy-making processes. It argues that Law's Allure reflects the strengths and weaknesses of this literature. On the plus side, it compellingly reinterprets the concept of legal precedent in political terms, showing how the content of judicial decisions serves as an iterative framing mechanism within and across various policy areas. On the downside, it struggles to provide a rigorous framework for analyzing the risks of the juridification of American politics. Despite any weaknesses, its attempt to map different pathways of legalistic court-based policy development in diverse settings represents a useful step for those interested in bringing the study of law and courts back into the core of analyzing American politics and policy making.     

The Boycott of the Law and the Law of the Boycott: Law, Labour, and Politics in British Columbia

This article uses a critical theoryllegal mobilization perspective to study the 1987–92 trade union boycott of the British Columbia labour law. The problems encountered establishing a total boycott–one that would eschew all contact with the state–and the subsequent modification of the parameters of the boycott through a selective reliance on the law offer an important case from which to learn more about the role of law and legal rights in highly regulated organizations and how collectives mobilize the law. The author argues that legal rights are important to unions because of their ability to mediate the complexity of labour relations through a decentralization of authority. At the same time, mobilization of the law for this purpose accentuates localized identities and unequal resources that operate in tension with a boycott ethos, necessitating a deliberative politics to legitimize the law. By exploring the tension between these two forms of mobilization around law–one to reduce complexity, another to legitimize broad collective norms–the author analyzes and draws some conclusions about the reproduction of social unionism in British Columbia.     

Do Victims of War Need International Law? Human Rights Education Programs in Authoritarian Sudan

Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Sudan, this article illuminates the consequences of human rights educational workshops as a form of humanitarian assistance in war‐ravaged areas. These projects are built on flawed assumptions about Sudanese politics and about the likelihood that human rights education empowers the war‐ravaged poor. The beneficial impacts of human rights discourse stem from its side effects, which fulfill urgent and symbolic needs, and not from the core content of human rights. The case of an authoritarian regime exposes an alternative site of rights promotion, outside the established or struggling democracies where most literature on rights resides. Bridging the literature on rights in Western, democratic contexts and on human rights in Africa, this article argues that law is not enough—and is potentially dangerous—in the insecure and impoverished areas where the international aid community has been encouraging it to flourish.     

Reconfiguring the Politics–Law Relationship in the Integration Project through Conflicts–Law Constitutionalism

This paper argues that the relationship between law and politics must be reconfigured within the European Union. Dissecting recent crises in economic, social and political organisation within Europe with reference to the three ‘fictitious’ commodities of Karl Polanyi, we find that law in Europe has contributed to de‐legalisation, de‐socialisation and disenfranchisement. Moving on to review the potential for law to respond to crisis through new paradigms of conflict resolution as suggested by Ralf Dahrendorf, we find that the steering capacity of law is nevertheless limited if it fails to establish a sustaining relationship with politics. Our conclusions are modest: conflict–law constitutionalism cannot solve Europe's many crises. However, it does represent a new paradigm of law within which relations between European law and European politics might be re‐established—a vital step to overcoming crisis.     

罗马法的借鉴价值

罗马法作为人类古代社会最发达的法律体系,流传至今仍不减其影响,关键在于它的借鉴价值。它随着罗马国家的形成应运而生,顺应罗马政治、经济的需要不断发展,随着东罗马帝国的灭亡逐渐衰落;但由于特殊的历史需要,罗马法在中世纪又获得“复兴”。其历史源远流长,以至达到了一个非常发达的程度,它以比较成熟的法学理论、深刻的法律思想、科学的法律体系等特色赢得了世人的瞩目。与此同时,罗马法的内容极其充实,它的很多原则和制度被近现代世界上许多国家所借鉴。不言而喻,罗马法对我国法制建设的作用也不容忽视,研究罗马法所得出的结论对我国法制现代化的过程有着深远的借鉴意义。     

论民法作为政治文明的法制与文化基础

在西方历史中,民法精神提供了推动政治文明进步的直接动力。民法作为政治文明法制与文化基础之根源在于, 政治文明以市民社会为基础,民法为市民社会基本法,民法文化为市民社会之文化。民法培育了政治文明系统的 基本要素,提供了促进政治文明的社会动力,并创造其运行的外围环境。中国的政治文明建设,应以民事立法的 发达为基础,并依赖于民法成为最广泛的社会文化,中国民法典则当然地承担这一政治使命。     

Law's Allure and the Power of Path-Dependent Legal Ideas

Gordon Silverstein's Law's Allure (2009) advances a two-part thesis on the power of legal ideas. The first is that legal precedents establish the ideological baselines on which legislative and bureaucratic policies are developed. Silverstein amply demonstrates the validity of this thesis. The second is that by establishing ideological baselines, legal precedents contribute to a version of path dependency (or the idea that early choices determine long-term developments) that is significantly more constraining than other forms of institutional entrenchment. Put simply, law shackles creativity in politics. This thesis I do not find persuasive, in part because Silverstein offers little evidence for it and in part because a growing body of literature suggests the contrary: the cross-fertilization of ideas from one field to another—law to politics, for instance—contributes to, rather than retards, creative change. Nonetheless, while its broader ambitions are not satisfied, Law's Allure's narrow thesis—that precedent profoundly shapes policy development—is important and worthy of a major book in itself.     

协商民主理念下加拿大公众参与环境法律实施的路径选择及对我国的启示

协商民主相对于参与民主而言,通过理性的协商对话消除冲突等不和谐因素,实现公共利益,更强调参与的深度。加拿大特有的国情为协商民主的实现提供了良好的氛围,公众参与环境法律实施是其环境法制革新的民主化方向,公众以政府与公民社会新型关系的参与路径确保协商主体的平等性;公众以环保专业知识、传统生态知识参与路径促进理性协商;公众以环保社团参与路径为主确保协商的团体优势;公众的全方位救济途径确保协商民主的有效性。当前我国在协商民主大环境下,公众参与环境法律实施路径应该变"被动参与"为"主动实施";变"松散参与"为"社团参与";变"无为参与"为"专业参与";变"单一救济"为"多元救济",从而实现积极、有序和有效的公众参与环境法律实施。     

宪法泛政治化的逻辑归谬与历史反思

马伯里诉麦迪逊案创立的“政治问题不审查”之宪法惯例及与美国宪法传统相契合的政治观,将对宪法正当性的逻辑判断转读为对于主体的道德依赖,其生成的逻辑结构未免带有强迫性,导致宪法的泛政治化。近代旧中国立宪的逻辑怪圈亦然:宪法“移植”使得“应然宪法”性状无法获得“实然宪法”有效地证明,则悖论产生;“自上而下”的立宪路径和权力本位,使得宪法缺少正当性基础;明显的“工具性”特征,造成“政治”与“宪法”的“目标冲突”,形成“体”和“用”的二律背反。事实就是:宪法的泛政治化是一个世界现象,防止宪法泛政治化,宪法司法化具有价值上的合理性,但以司法化为导向的中国宪政目标之实现尚需经历一个长期的准备阶段,要防止两种极端倾向:悲观主义和冒进主义。     

Legitimacy is Not Authority

The two leading traditions of theorizing about democratic legitimacy are liberalism and deliberative democracy. Liberals typically claim that legitimacy consists in the consent of the governed, while deliberative democrats typically claim that legitimacy consists in the soundness of political procedures. Despite this difference, both traditions see the need for legitimacy as arising from the coercive enforcement of law and regard legitimacy as necessary for law to have normative authority. While I endorse the broad aims of these two traditions, I believe they both misunderstand the nature of legitimacy. In this essay I argue that the legitimacy of a law is neither necessary nor sufficient for its normative authority, and I argue further that the need for legitimacy in law arises regardless of whether the law is coercively enforced. I thus articulate a new understanding of the legitimacy and authority of law.     

Rediscovering the public/private divide in EU private law

This article explores the role of the public/private divide within EU private law. It shows that although EU private law cuts across the boundaries of public and private law, the conceptual distinction between these well‐established categories does matter within it and may lead to better law‐making in the EU more generally. The legal grammar of a particular EU harmonisation measure—which can be more “public” or “private”—may have important implications for the position of private parties at national level, for the CJEU's likely activism in this context, and ultimately for the measure's ability to realise its policy goals. Therefore, instead of ignoring the existing differences between public and private law, EU law should explicitly adopt the public/private law language in its discourse, without, however, introducing any sharp divide between these two areas.     

Reflective Judgement and Prudential Rationality: A Contribution to an Inclusive Practical Application of Law

Hannah Arendt has developed a theory of the importance of judgment of taste for political manners, founded on the Kantian aesthetic theory. Nowadays this theory is considered a current theoretical reference for establishing a political way to reconcile the demands of the radicalization of deliberative democracy with the need for political inclusion (Iris Marion Young, Seyla Benhabib). Albena Azmanova in her The Scandal of Reason: A Critical Theory of Political Judgment proposes an inclusive political rhetoric. The political theory founded on judgment is based on Kant’s philosophy; it was developed by Arendt and has greatly influenced the current debate, as an alternative theory in which the moral basis of law can be more sensitive to human contexts; a universalist theory more adequate for dealing with the tragic dimension of human life. The theory of political judgment uses the concepts of reflective judgment and ‘enlarged thought’ as its main concepts. As a starting point, a theory like this considers the singular judgments of justice that each person makes. The background, therefore, is not a rational foundation of principles, but the capacity of rational beings to make judgments. This post-metaphysical theory of law, based on a theory of judgment, is a critique of legal positivism, but presents itself as an alternative to the idealistic theory of law. But this theoretical project has received some criticism related to the adequacy of Arendt’s rereading of Kantian philosophy and her attempt to approximate Kant’s reflective judgment to the Aristotelian concept of phronêsis. Some critics, such as Bryan Garsten, believe that Kant’s rhetoric of public reason diminished and displaced the prudential faculty of judgment that Arendt is to be interested in reviving. Arendt’s attempt to find a theory of judgment in Kant’s aesthetic theory is not successful, in Garsten’s view. Our purpose is to show that a critical theory of judicial judgment is not only possible, but necessary; Arendt’s theory of judgment offers an important contribution to a critical theory of judicial judgment, particularly one devoted to the construction of a legal theory that prioritizes a politics of social inclusion. This theory proposes a critical approach to the project of the procedural conception of democracy, since it can mask social exclusion. An adequate understanding of judicial argumentation cannot forget that it happens in a rhetorical context: it is not only important what a discourse says, but how it says it. The radicalization of deliberative democracy supposes a revision of the ways judicial deliberation is thought: not by reference to universal or at least general principles, but taking into consideration what is ‘critically relevant’, with a view to remedying social injustice (following Azmanova).