Author’s reply to four commentaries on ‘Legal Subjects and Juridical Persons: Developing Public Legal Theory through Fuller and Arendt.’

In her paper, Rundle seeks to develop a normative legal theory that is distinctively public. Building on her book, Forms Liberate, she seeks to bring Fuller’s legal theory into conversation with Arendt’s political theory. In this comment, I present some hesitations with regard to the fruitfulness of this conversation. It concludes with the suggestion to explore how Radbruch’s ‘idea of law’ could be fruitful for the overall jurisprudential project Rundle seeks to develop in her work.

Can jurisprudence fruitfully pursue a synthesis of Arendt’s political theory and Fuller’s normative legal philosophy? Might their ideas of the juridical person and the legal subject be aligned as a result of a shared concern for the value of legality, specifically of an institutional complex which is structured through the stability and predictability of the rule of law? It is doubtful that Arendt's concern for the phenomena of plurality, political freedom and action can usefully be brought into line with Fuller's normativist focus on legality, subjectivity and the inner morality of law. This doubt is explored by juxtaposing Arendt's theory of action and her remarks on the revolution, foundation and augmentation of power and authority with Fuller's philosophy that, however critical of its positivist adversaries, remains ultimately tied to a Hobbesian tradition which views authority and power in abstract, hierarchical and individualist terms.

The ‘public’ character of the kind of rule of law theorizing with which Lon Fuller was engaged is signalled especially in his attention to the very notion of being a ’legal subject’ at all. This point is central to the aim of this paper to explore the animating commitments, of substance and method alike, of a particular direction of legal theorizing: one which commences its inquiry from an assessment of conditions of personhood within a public legal frame. Opening up this inquiry to resources beyond Fuller, the paper makes a novel move in its consideration of how the political theorist Hannah Arendt’s reflections on the ‘juridical person’ might aid a legal theoretical enterprise of this kind.

Introduction to this special issue of NJLP.

Rundle criticizes the command conception of law by means of Fuller’s and Arendt’s concept of human agency. However, neither of these two authors derive law from human agency, as Rundle seems to think. Instead they stress that personhood can only be attributed to physical human beings on the basis of law. Moreover, their theories cannot be understood as answers to Rundle’s question – whatever that may be – but as answers to their own questions and concerns. In the case of Arendt and Fuller, these concerns were so different that the enterprise to reconcile them seems futile. Rundle’s approach can be understood as the attempt to deal with philosophy as if it were legal doctrine.

This contribution introduces the special issue, which contains a selection of the lectures delivered by key-note speakers during the Summer School organized by the editors in August, 2013, at the behest of the Section of Ethics & Practical Philosophy of the Dutch Research School of Philosophy (OZSW).

This article puts forward the claim that private law, and especially contract and tort, is the area of law that most clearly shows how law depends on social interactions. Taking its cue from Lon Fuller, interactional law is presented as a form of law that depends on informal social practices. Using tort and contract cases, it is argued that this implies that law is in open connection to moral norms and values, and that law cannot be understood without taking into account people’s everyday reciprocal expectancies.

Communities can only be dynamic and projective, that is, oriented towards new and better forms of cooperation, if they bring together diverse people in a common, and hopefully more equal, socio-political life and in welfare. The latter requires not only back-stretched connections, that is, the involvement of co-nationals and naturalized persons, but also forward-starched connections, that is, the involvement of citizens in waiting. Societal integration is an unhelpful notion and liberal democratic polities would benefit from reflecting critically on civic integration policies and extending the norm of reciprocity beyond its assigned liberal national limits. Reciprocity can only be a comprehensive norm in democratic societies - and not an eclectic one, that is, either co-national or co-ethnic.

I focus on Hobbes’s claim that the law is ’the publique Conscience, by which [the individual] (…) hath already undertaken to be guided.’ This claim is not authoritarian once it is set in the context of his complex account, which involves three different relationships of reciprocity: the contractarian idea that individuals in the state of nature agree with one another to institute a sovereign whose prescriptions they shall regard as binding; the vertical, reciprocal relationship between ruler and ruled; and the horizontal relationship between individuals in the civil condition, made possible by the existence of the sovereign who through enacting laws dictates the terms of interaction between his subjects. The interaction of these three relationships has the result that subjects relate to each other on terms that reflect their status as free and equal individuals who find that the law enables them to pursue their own conceptions of the good.

Rawls’s ’idealized’ notion of reciprocity is compared with the ’real-life’ concept of reciprocity as it has been developed in social scientific theory. The two perspectives appear to differ significantly as concerns dimensions related to equality, human motivation, the temporal aspects of reciprocity, and the supposed mental origin of reciprocity. Whereas norms of obligation and feelings of moral indebtedness are constitutive for reciprocity in real-life encounters, equality, freedom and rationality are the basis for reciprocity in the hypothetical world of the ’conjectural account’. Rather than being fundamentally incompatible, the idealized and the real-life perspectives on reciprocity seem to apply to different spheres of social life, the first requiring greater formality and universality than the second, which allows for more variation and particularities.

Reciprocity seems to figure as a self-evident normative foundation of legal orders. Yet a clear understanding of the often opaque role that reciprocity plays in this regard demands drawing a conceptual distinction. This article views reciprocity as a social morality of duties, in opposition to mutuality, which concerns a legal morality of rights. In everyday life these two broad categories of human interaction interfere in a dynamic way. They need to be brought into an appropriate balance in legal orders, for the sake of justice. The practical relevance of this conceptual distinction is clarified by the debate about justice between present and future generations. I argue that this debate should be viewed as a debate about the terms of reciprocity rather than relations of mutuality. Acknowledging the deeply reciprocal nature of the relations between past, present and future generations would lead to a more convincing moral theory about intergenerational justice.

Reciprocity may serve to explain or to justify law. In its latter capacity, which is the topic of this article, reciprocity is commonly turned into a highly idealized notion, as either a balance between two free and equal parties or as the possibility of communication tout court. Both ideals lack empirical reference. If sociological and anthropological literature on forms of exchange is taken into account, it should be acknowledged that reciprocal relations are easy to destabilize. The dynamics of exchange invites exclusion and inequality. For this reason reciprocity should not be presupposed as the normative underpinning of law; instead, law should be presupposed in order to turn reciprocity into a desirable ideal.