| Abstract: | What follows is an attempt to do some conceptual housekeeping around the notion of secret law as provided by Christopher Kutz (2013). First I consider low‐salience (or merely obscure) law, suggesting that it fails to capture the legal and moral facts that are at stake in the case which Kutz used to motivate it. Then I outline a theoretical contrast between mere obscurity and secrecy, in contrast to the “neutral” account of secrecy provided by Sissela Bok (1989). The upshot of the two sections is that low‐salience law is neither secret law nor necessarily problematic, though it closely resembles a kind of law that is both secret and problematic, namely, those legal obscurities that subvert manifest interests related to the informational needs of citizens. The ensuing argument undermines the fiction of constructive presence found in Austin and Blackstone. |
