Democratic Legitimacy and the Scientific Foundation of Modern Law
-
Roger Berkowitz
This Article explores the unacknowledged impact of the scientific provenance of modern law. Justice, I argue, is threatened by social scientific thinking that subordinates justice to legitimacy, efficiency, and fairness. In doing so, I show that the power of the asserted connection between positive law and democracy depends upon a dangerous blurring of the distinction between justice and legitimacy. Finally, I offer an alternative genealogy of positive law that shows modern law to have been transformed into a science. My hope is that by pointing to the threatened loss of justice as an ideal, my work can help to hold open the possibility that law reclaim its foundation in the art of judgment instead of the science of law.
©2011 Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, Berlin/Boston
Articles in the same Issue
- Article
- Introduction
- Constitutionalism as Mindset: Reflections on Kantian Themes About International Law and Globalization
- Aristotle on Constitutionalism and the Rule of Law
- In the Blind Spot: The Hybridization of Contracting
- The Shuffle of Things: Law and Knowledge in "Modern Society"
- Democratic Legitimacy and the Scientific Foundation of Modern Law
- The Two-State Solution: Providence and Catastrophe
- "What Are the Gods to Us Now?": Secular Theology and the Modernity of Law
- Transformations of Kinship and the Acceleration of History Thesis
- Animal Laws and the Politics of Life: Slaughterhouse Regulation in Germany, 1870-1917
- The Critical Modernism of Hannah Arendt
- Modern Times: Law, Temporality and Happiness in Hobbes, Locke and Bentham
- Time and Law
Articles in the same Issue
- Article
- Introduction
- Constitutionalism as Mindset: Reflections on Kantian Themes About International Law and Globalization
- Aristotle on Constitutionalism and the Rule of Law
- In the Blind Spot: The Hybridization of Contracting
- The Shuffle of Things: Law and Knowledge in "Modern Society"
- Democratic Legitimacy and the Scientific Foundation of Modern Law
- The Two-State Solution: Providence and Catastrophe
- "What Are the Gods to Us Now?": Secular Theology and the Modernity of Law
- Transformations of Kinship and the Acceleration of History Thesis
- Animal Laws and the Politics of Life: Slaughterhouse Regulation in Germany, 1870-1917
- The Critical Modernism of Hannah Arendt
- Modern Times: Law, Temporality and Happiness in Hobbes, Locke and Bentham
- Time and Law
