FAQ

2024 Next

Publication date: 13.12.2024

Description
The publication of this volume was financed by Faculty of International and Political Studies at the Jagiellonian University and Nomos Centre.

Licence: CC BY  licence icon

Editorial team

Editor-in-Chief Orcid Przemysław Tacik

Issue content

Pierre Legrand

Exceptions, 1/2024, 2024, pp. 7 - 47

This essay concerns the epistemology of comparative law. With reference to the supposedly obvious yet defyingly ambagious matter of foreignness, I submit to critical scrutiny the comparing mind’s anticipant and desirous intervention as it introjects itself within foreign law. Even as comparative law allows foreign law a seemingly unproblematic conceptual and analytical presence – what text issuing from the field has sought to probe the tralatitious yet nebulous implexity of foreignness? – I hold that the comparatist’s propelling interruption, notwithstanding its eagerness to purloin and rehearse foreign law as such, cannot but fail to stand as an unalloyed expression of foreignness. Indeed, the comparing mind’s ‘foreignness’ is inevitably selfed, which entails that it is inescapably unforeign.
Read more Next

Riccardo Baldissone

Exceptions, 1/2024, 2024, pp. 49 - 86

In the preface to his 1957 book The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Mediaeval Political Theology, Ernst Kantorowicz gives us an excusatio non petita for the absence of a chapter on the duplication of bodies in ecclesiastical offices. He claims that in his book ‘in an indirect fashion, the ecclesiastical side of the problem has not been neglected.’ By highlighting the need to address the ‘ecclesiastical side’ of medieval bodily duplications Kantorowicz both admits the latter’s importance and risks obscuring its genealogical priority over its ‘secular’ counterpart. The task of this note is to underline the priority of ‘ecclesiastical’ over ‘secular’ medieval duplications, to rescue both of them from the retrospective projection of the Schmittian notion of political theology, and to recontextualize their historical cultural milieu as juridical theology. Such a recontextualization may allow us to throw some light on a vastly unappreciated theoretical watershed in European culture.
Read more Next

William Watkin

Exceptions, 1/2024, 2024, pp. 87 - 126

There is something essential we need to know of power that is visible only when power makes certain exceptions. Power, we are arguing, is fundamentally without content. This occluded piece of information about power is partially illuminated at every exception to a rule but appears to only be fully visible to thought when a state of exception is declared by someone in power. This seems to be the crucial point of the theories of the exception elaborated by Giorgio Agamben, Carl Schmitt and Walter Benjamin. Schmitt because the sovereign decision is content indifferent. Benjamin because it is only if you remove referential content from the terms exception and rule that you could mistake the two words for the same thing. Agamben because according to his theory of signatures, the law appears as ultimately contentless. Through a close engagement with the theories of these three authors, this article suggest that an exception is not some statement or ruling which stands outside the rule, but is the process wherein the interior of the rule, its actual rulings, is either negated or suspended. Is this what the legal exception is, the indifferentiation of law’s specific contents?
Read more Next

Tomáš Havlíček

Exceptions, 1/2024, 2024, pp. 127 - 150

More than thirty years ago, the countries of the Eastern bloc experienced a significant societal rebirth in rejecting of totalitarianism. Over the years, these policies have taken steps that have led them to the current state of legal democracy and late capitalism. But every system we know has its perversions and inevitably leads to a social crisis. In his ‘state-destroying’ work The Power of the Powerless, Václav Havel presents several concepts that helped him describe the totalitarianism that the countries of the Eastern bloc experienced: ‘post-totalitarian system’, ‘post-democracy’, and ‘dissent’. This paper argues in favor of the relevance of these concepts for the contemporary world, although, it will be claimed, its cruelty and inhumanity are much more subtle than in the regimes we have known so far.

The primary objective of this article is to draw parallels between well-known totalitarian regimes and the current (neo)liberal democracy through the conceptual framework of post-totalitarianism. Originating from the period preceding the fall of the Iron Curtain, this notion takes historical evolution into account, focusing on the CEE regions post the Iron Curtain era/after the regime change. The author applies Havel’s insights and theories to analyze this historical trajectory and asserts that we inhabit a system inherently containing totalitarian elements, where the fulfillment of liberty hangs on an unreachable branch. Consequently, this study delves into the possibilities for societal development or change within today’s post-totalitarian system, by having recourse, among other arguments, to Havel’s notion of post-democracy.
Read more Next

Andrej Krištofík

Exceptions, 1/2024, 2024, pp. 151 - 168

This article deals with the possible impact of automated decision- making on law. It argues that such could constitute a death of the law. To demonstrate this point, the article describes the underlying technological process of machine learning. It describes its negative impact on possible future reinterpretation and development of law that reflects societal development. As such, the tools of automation represent an ideal tool for the conservation of the existing status quo. Further, this article deals with the idea that for law to be just it needs to be not only personalized but always made anew in each judgement. This is also made impossible due to the described nature of the automation which makes the law not only forever cemented in its ways, denying any contestation, but rids it of any justice, which is the legitimizing element of the laws’ violence.
Read more Next

Monica Thiel

Exceptions, 1/2024, 2024, pp. 169 - 200

It is an imperative to investigate the reasons for the rise of authoritarian states in a way that will affect global democratic stability and worldwide order within international law. Although international law primarily regulates state relations, there are no regulations that address state, non-state actors and regimes’ authoritarian practices. The article introduces authoritarian capital to highlight the development of blurred authority through 5 differing national, international and transnational phases within international law. The development of authoritarian capital from states, non-state actors and regimes from the theoretical framework in the 5 phases reveal gaps within international law to adequately address declining democracy and increasing authoritarianism within national, international and transnational norms. In addition, the advancement of international law is constrained due to an under theorized state and non-state actors use of authority within institutions and legal norms. Consequently, international law emphasizes merely state behavior and obligations rather than non-state actors as participants in the law making processes. By paying attention to the 5 differing phases of authoritarian capital, the article delivers a new and improved understanding of growing types of authoritarianism within democratic countries and non-democratic countries to help legal scholars to address state and non-state actors’ increasing authoritarianism within international law.
Read more Next

Funding information

The publication of this volume was financed by Faculty of International and Political Studies at the Jagiellonian University and Nomos Centre.