Philosophy: LAW (art?) – needing help

So I’m taking a Philosophy of Law course now and have to choose a final paper topic. I need help. Law has never been of much interest to me: perhaps because I’ve always seen only its surface – the ‘laws’ out there. I’ve never much bothered to examine how/why the laws come to be: historical reasons, embedded principles, democracy, fear and hope, sophistry and dialogue.

I’m reading a work called “Legal Modernism” by David Luban now, the first chapter in a larger work. It sets up Critical Legal Studies (CLS) in relation to how Modern art, and Modernism more broadly, respond to pre-modern art.

Modernism is self-critical and iconoclastic. Under its neo-Kantian interpretation, however, I have claimed that it amounts to much more (or less) than an undifferentiated negation of the premodernist tradition. (p.71)

Simple enough. Pre-modern law, art, and philosophy took itself for granted as reaching into the bowels of reality and exposing them, frozen in time, to all who wished to look on. Modernism sees that reality is never frozen and, more importantly, that the subject (s/he who ‘looks on’) is an intimate part of reality, in dialogue, or better – dialectic – with it. Reality cannot be given to the viewer. The viewer must be pulled out of this false ‘gods eye view’. To do this requires tension.

In philosophy and law it is the same. To seek a Truth which may be put into law or philosophical treatise is to deny one’s responsibility as partaker and participant in Truth. The pursuit of Truth ‘out there’ was good – for its time – but cannot sustain itself. Truth ‘out there’ is, as the Dalai Lama says of war, ‘out of date’.

Law, like philosophy, must engage us as the participants that we are. Law must be engaged with as the living, growing, moving thing that it is.

Yet this is hardly the start of a decent paper.