Professor Martin Gak - Demarcating the space of the political: on legitimacy, justification and normative efficaciousness of the law

This Friday, 27th of February, 14:15 (@Jakobi 2 - 336) professor Martin Gak will present on Demarcating the space of the political: on legitimacy, justification and normative efficaciousness of the law

Everyone is welcome!

Abstract

A strange paradox resides at the core of legal adjudication in everyday life. The choice to follow the law cannot be justified by the law.   In the average and everyday performance of actions in accordance to law, knowledge of the letter of the law is mostly absent.  While the formal integrity of the action accords with the statute, the agent is either oblivious to the law or entirely ignorant of it.  In this, I will argue, resides the strength of its normative force and it is precisely for this reason, that, in the everyday, the law requires no justification.  But against this backdrop, any act of deliberate acquiescence to the law calls for  justification.  Should I wait for the free light when no cars or people are coming? Should I smoke a joint? Should I get on the subway without a ticket? The illegality of the action does not preclude its performative possibility and indeed, the very question shows that the alternative possibility is available to the agent. The question is simply by what standard is that the agent must judge whether to acquiesce or not to the law.  If the law were the standard of adjudication, the illegal action would be precluded and no question of alternative possibility would exist. Rather, at each juncture of choosing in accordance to the law, the law itself must be chosen and this requires a superseding principle. My argument is that at each stage in which any one law is deliberately chosen, a moral and political question has been resolved: is the law justified? What this also means, is that it is in the liability of of the law to a meta-juridical evaluation in the daily acts of deliberative reason where political agency emerges. This, I will show, is the place in which the invisibility of the law as habit is suspended and where the legal and the moral compete for justificatory sufficiency.