In the conversation with Ramin Jahanbegloo, Sir Isaiah Berlin, who strongly advocated the value of negative freedom, admits that society would not be existed without some authority. He too worries that the liberty of the individual could be intervened by the authority, but it was almost impossible to assert that individuals can live without society, even for Berlin. The individual, unfortunately, cannot be completely free; it is inevitable to get involved in social relations. Law, from my previous perspective, was simply a sort of societal promise that the people must follow and a method to protect the people from any harm. However, my point of view on law has changed after I read Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish which is in the reading list.

A public torture or execution was the most popular spectacle in France until the eighteenth century, however, the role of physical punishment as a public performance was completely disappeared from the nineteenth century. Torture or execution in front of the crowd was no longer enough to punish the offender effectively. The reform of the entire economy of punishment, according to Foucault, turned out by the emergence of a new theory of law and crime. I suddenly have begun to get suspicious about the position of law in the context of our day-to-day life. I thought the role of law as protecting justice and the individual freedom within society. Law, however, in the Discipline and Punish, seemed like an apparatus to control the liberty of the individual and even the individual themselves. I have begun to think that not only the criminal are regulated by law, but also the innocent are not entirely free from the power of it. Every human beings are existed under the surveillance of law. Law produces disciplines in society, disciplines then create individuals. Foucault’s work eventually has caused me to suspect law itself in various ways and to focus on the study of law.

As a first blog post, I would like to open up the question: does law aim at protecting the people or controlling them? I hope to find the answer through the course.

The judicial need for swift effectiveness brings evidentiary proceedings in a complicated conversation. Even though law is intended to be structured within the pursuit of the good, there is a gap between the true context of visual documentation and its makings as a factual piece of evidence. Margaret Davies asks the question in why science answering sciences natural intervention of empirical scientific theory into legal practice. The intervention of western scientific thought replaced its previous theological practice as a new norm for regulating, and imposing justice. When there is an intent for social regulation, with the pursuit of fact based evidence to impose the law there can be a dangerous space when science does not fit legal interpretation. Peter goodrich in Historical aspects of legal interpretation describes how fickle legal interpretation can be in hermeneutics and exegesis, through the more structured based science of linguistics. the interpretation of text can be a bit more rectified to a truth when analytical space is created for the code. However, the interpretation of language aside law is still left with the question of image based evidence. If there is a semblance of structured legal interpretation of language this leaves no legal standing infrastructure for the image to be correctly interpreted. This leaves the evidentiary image only described, and interpreted through the lense of a pre existing legal language. It is important to note the lack of possible scientific language used to fully contextualize documented events. The image is always vulnerable to altered interpretation to sway what should be a factual argument. We can see this manipulation today in the American prosecution of police violence and their image based evidence. 

One thing will be stressed again and again by the law professor during his introductory course: law is the discipline of rules which are recognized and sanctioned by the state.

Law students will be told  early in their education that they are to become part of  a caste of secular priests charged with translating everyday facts into legal concepts. They are about to learn how to give legal consequences to legal facts.

As lawyers, we tend to see ourselves as depositors of a science of law, a special capacity to understand cases and to predict with certainty the outcomes of legal problems . This exercise in prediction makes lawyers objective seers to the extent that they pretend to interpret neutrally and the legal language.

In the past, lawyers eschewed the idea of a neutral law and insisted on the ideas of justice and virtue. This position seems to have completely lost currency today.

Law and Humanities seems to have the potential to reveal again that law is discursive, a manipulation of language. It can thus been studied as such (and critiqued as such). Some hope that such a conception will once again allow lawyers to re-imagine their role as purveyors of legal meaning in society as including the search for justice.

Lawyers have, however, shown a remarkable capacity for cognitive dissonance. It would not be surprising if humanities were to be recycled into a tool preparing young minds for the demands of the job market, a veneer of self-reflexivity and liberalism on hired guns in the service of power.

Few days ago few friends and I were discussing ways to make extra cash, we were looking for an easy yet “legal” way. One suggested selling of a kidney, as we joked about it. We searched the net and what came to us as a shock one kidney in the US black market can go for $250 thousand dollars.

I always thought of our bodies as our own property, we had the right to do what we want with it. If one wants to engage in surrogacy, prostitution, etc they are free to do so. As I read through the article by Anne Phillips, looking at the word property in a literal way never crossed my mind before. If one is able to to use their body to clean someone’s house or plant a garden then they should be able to use their bodies for other things as well. I’m not sure if I really agree with this justification. Inequality is wide spread and people are looking for ways to try and get out of that state. Placing restrictions on markets might not be the way to go, but I’m also not sure if regulating it will be the answer as well.

We should have control over our own bodies but I think with limitations. And we need to be careful with the use of the language around body property.

Reading through the Law & Humanities corpus of texts brought about a slight but essential, at least to me, change in the relationship I have towards law. Coming from a civil law background, I always felt like law was imposed upon me. I had to learn “how law is and how to apply it accordingly”, whether I liked it or not. In this sense, it is possible to say I adopted an attitude of “double surrender” as David Kennedy would call it. Law has to be cold, amoral and/or immoral. Law is not about being just, law is about law.

Now, law is no longer something I endure, passively but a subject of which I have a better understanding and therefore, a subject I can actively engage with and that I can accept, or not. I find this of particular importance as an aspiring international human rights lawyer because of the strong ideological stance it involves.
By being aware of the ontological contingency of law, I can embrace a more ethical position by choosing to adhere to it or not. Acknowledgment of this ideological constraint, on the other hand, encourage me, if not force me, to adopt an attitude receptive to challenges and admit the possibility that my principles might not be the same or understood differently by others. Having said that, I do not think it forces me to sink into strict relativism but rather that it enables me to make a conscious and enlightened choice as to what principles I chose to abide to. From an inner perspective, it changes the way I will interact with “others”, it means that my attitude cannot be dogmatic anymore for it would defeat, and in fact, contradict the very idea of universalism.
Indeed, if human rights and liberal values are understood as a rebellion (révolte, in French) – in an “camusian” sense- against the oppression of the absolutist power, and aim ultimately to “free the whole humanity”, it necessarily entails the risk of “losing itself”: “A rebellion that loses the truth of its origins will give birth to a close totality, universal crime, an aristocracy of cynicism and a wish for apocalypse” ( Albert Camus, “L’Homme révolté”).