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Abstract
This article considers the ontological and epistemological questions about European Union (EU) law raised by the phenomenon known as constitutional pluralism, and the challenge this presents to theories of law based on the concept of a legal system. It does so by heuristically comparing the EU legal order and the “Marvel Universe” of Marvel Comics, as both an extension and critique of Ronald Dworkin's analogy between interpreting law and writing a chain novel. The article explicates the concept of a “storyworld” in narrative theory and discusses the Marvel Universe's significance in this respect. It then outlines the similarities between EU law and the Marvel Universe, using the concept of a storyworld to build and apply a theoretical framework that can move beyond orthodox views of constitutional pluralism. Lastly, the article uses these insights to begin laying the groundwork for a new theory of law termed “legal experientialism,” which understands law as an irreducible world that is both experienced and constructed through our collective interpretive practices.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The author thanks Charlie Eastaugh, Christopher Taggart, and the anonymous reviewer for their insightful comments. He also thanks the staff and student attendees at the Surrey Centre for Law & Philosophy for their thought-provoking questions concerning the first presented draft of this article.
DISCLOSURE STATEMENT
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1. As Bart Beaty acknowledged at a roundtable discussion at the 2016 Society for Cinema and Media Studies conference (Atlanta, USA, April 2 2016), there are now several “well carved out area[s] of comics studies,” including autobiography and superhero studies; Blair Davis, Bart Beaty, Scott Bukatman, Henry Jenkins, and Benjamin Woo, “Roundtable: Comics and Methodology,” Inks: Journal of the Comics Studies Society 1, no. 1 (2017): 56–74, 61.
2. For example, Thomas Giddens, ed., Graphic Justice: Intersections of Comics and Law (Abingdon: Routledge, 2015); and the special issue of Law Text Culture 16 [“Justice Framed: Law in Comics and Graphic Novels”] (2012). In Dale Mitchell's words, these two form a “Dynamic Duo” in law and comics scholarship; Dale Mitchell, “Graphic Justice: Intersections of Comics and Law (Review),” Griffith Law Review 25, no. 4 (2016): 617–620, 619.
3. Perhaps the most prominent recent example of this is Cass Sunstein's work on Star Wars; Cass R. Sunstein, The World According to Star Wars (New York: Dey Street, 2016).
4. Examples of this vein of law and literature include studies of law and justice within William Shakespeare's works; e.g., Kenji Yoshino, A Thousand Times More Fair: What Shakespeare's Plays Teach Us About Justice (New York: Ecco, 2011).
5. For example, Law's Stories: Narrative and Rhetoric in the Law, ed. Peter Brooks and Paul Gewirtz (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1996); Richard A. Posner, “Legal Narratology,” University of Chicago Law Review 64 (1997): 737; and Peter Brooks, “Narrative Transactions – Does the Law Need a Narratology?,” Yale Journal of Law and the Humanities 18, no. 1 (2006): 1.
6. For Dworkin's first published use of this analogy, see Ronald Dworkin, “Law as Interpretation,” Critical Inquiry 9, no. 1 (1982): 179.
7. Ronald Dworkin, Law's Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986), 228–38. “Best fit and justification” is discussed more thoroughly in the next section.
8. I would place most of the essays in Giddens, Graphic Justice, and the 2012 special issue of Law Text Culture (see note 2) in the latter category.
9. Benjamin Authers, “What Had Been Many Became One: Continuity, the Common Law, and Crisis on Infinite Earths,” Law Text Culture 1, no. 6 (2012): 65–92, 67.
10. Ibid., 65.
11. As explained below in detail, the “storyworld” is the fictional setting in which a story's events take place and characters reside. “Constitutional pluralism” is also explained below.
12. This shift in storytelling at Marvel Comics took place under the editorship of the iconic comic writer and artist Stan Lee; Bart Beaty, “Introduction: In Focus: Comics Studies Fifty Years after Film Studies,” Cinema Journal 50, no. 3 (2011): 106–110, 109.
13. Neil MacCormick coined the term “constitutional pluralism” in Neil MacCormick, Questioning Sovereignty: Law, State and Nation in the European Commonwealth (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999).
14. This is often known as the Solange saga; Bundesverfassungsgericht (BVerfGE) [Federal Constitutional Court] May 29, 1974, 37 BVerfGE 271 (hereinafter “Solange I”); October 22, 1986, 73 BVerfGE 33 (hereinafter “Solange II”).
15. Case 11-70 Internationale Handelsgesellschaft mbH v Einfuhr- und Vorratsstelle für Getreide und Futtermittel, [1970] ECR 1125.
16. Solange I and II.
17. Julie Dickson, “How Many Legal Systems? Some Puzzles Regarding the Identity Conditions of and Relations between Legal Systems in the European Union,” Problema 2 (2008): 9.
18. For some recent works in legal philosophy that argue this, see Keith C. Culver and Michael Giudice, Legality's Borders: An Essay in General Jurisprudence (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010); and Sionaidh Douglas-Scott, Law after Modernity (Oxford: Hart, 2013).
19. Dworkin, Law's Empire, ch. 7. This point about the systemic properties of legal interpretivism is discussed below.
20. I say “apparent” obligations to avoid taking a position on whether, as a matter of moral or political philosophy, law actually creates obligations. For present purposes, I simply wish to make the descriptive point that actors within law-governed societies understand law as creating obligations, irrespective of whether they are correct to do so.
21. As should become evident as this discussion progresses, in both the literary and the legal contexts, the separation between “author” and “reader” is far from clear. In the legal context, this largely stems from how, as law relies upon some broader bedrock of belief in its existence, the “readers” of law are also (in some sense) involved in law's creation, even in societies where there is a formal division of labor between those who make the law and those who do not.
22. Robert Cover, “The Supreme Court, 1982 Term – Foreword: Nomos and Narrative,” Harvard Law Review 97 (1983): 4. The final section of this article acknowledges my intellectual debt to Cover in detail. See also Robert Cover, “Violence and the Word,” Yale Law Journal 95 (1986): 1601.
23. The locus classicus of legal positivism is John Austin's statement that “[t]he existence of law is one thing; its merit or dismerit is another”; John Austin, The Province of Jurisprudence Determined (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 157 .
24. The Rule of Recognition consists of a social practice (or “convergence of behavior”) amongst officials, criticism for deviating from the practice, and a belief that the deviation is a good reason for the criticism (a “critical reflective attitude”); H. L. A. Hart, The Concept of Law (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 55–57.
25. Ronald Dworkin, “The Model of Rules I,” in Taking Rights Seriously (London: Duckworth, 2005), 14. For Hart's core/penumbra distinction, see H. L. A. Hart, “Positivism and the Separation of Law and Morals,” Harvard Law Review 71, no. 4 (1958): 593–629, 607.
26. Dworkin, “Model of Rules I,” 44–45.
27. Ronald Dworkin, “Can Rights be Controversial?,” in Taking Rights Seriously, 279.
28. Dworkin, Law's Empire, 255.
29. Ibid., ch. 7.
30. Ronald Dworkin, “Hard Cases,” in Taking Rights Seriously, 115.
31. Dworkin, Law's Empire, 190–91.
32. Ibid., 228–38.
33. Ibid., 238–75.
34. For a famous overview and analysis of this within Anglo-American jurisprudence, see Joseph Raz, The Concept of a Legal System: An Introduction to the Theory of Legal System (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980).
35. Ibid., 1.
36. Ibid.
37. Ibid., 2.
38. Ibid.
39. Ibid., 129.
40. Ibid.
41. Ibid., 129.
42. This is the function of Hart's Rule of Recognition (see note 24).
43. Raz uses such tree diagrams throughout Raz, Concept of a Legal System.
44. A. W. B. Simpson, “The Common Law and Legal Theory,” in Oxford Essays in Jurisprudence, Second Series, ed. A. W. B. Simpson (Oxford: Clarendon, 1973), 81.
45. Dworkin, “Model of Rules I,” 17–22.
46. Charles Sampford, The Disorder of Law: A Critique of Legal Theory (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989), 84.
47. For some of the many examples, see Bruno de Witte, “Direct Effect, Supremacy and the Nature of the Legal Order,” in The Evolution of EU Law, ed. Paul Craig and Gráinne de Burca (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), ch. 12; Karen J. Alter, Establishing the Supremacy of European Law: The Making of an International Rule of Law in Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001); and MacCormick, Questioning Sovereignty.
48. Case 6/64 Costa v Ente Nazionale per l’Energia Elettrica [1964] ECR 588, [1964] CMLR 425, 455.
49. Solange I.
50. October 12, 1993, 89 BVerfGE 155 (hereinafter “Brunner”). For an English translation, see [1994] 1 CMLR 57. “The Treaties” in question are the two foundational Treaties of the EU, namely the Treaty on European Union and the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union.
51. June 30, 2009, 2 BVerfGE 2/08 (hereinafter “Gauweiler”).
52. Dickson, “How Many Legal Systems?”
53. Ibid., 11–12.
54. H. Porter Abbott, The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 19, 169.
55. Marie-Laure Ryan, “From Parallel Universes to Possible Worlds: Ontological Pluralism in Physics, Narratology, and Narrative,” Poetics Today 27, no. 4 (2006): 633–674, 646.
56. This interpretation of metalepsis is also termed “ontological metalepsis,” as opposed to purely metaphoric instances of metalepsis that do not involve any actual boundary crossing; Alice Bell and Jan Alder, “Ontological Metalepsis and Unnatural Narratology,” Journal of Narrative Theory 42, no. 2 (2012): 166–192, 167.
57. Ibid., 168. For definitions and typologies of metalepsis other than those presented here, see John Pier, “Metalepsis,” in Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory, ed. David Herman, Manfred Jahn, and Marie-Laure Ryan (London and New York: Routledge, 2007).
58. Unsurprisingly, metalepsis is closely associated with postmodern fiction because of how it has “the effect of interrupting and complicating the ontological ‘horizon’ of the fiction, multiplying its worlds, and laying bare the process of world-construction”; Brian McHale, “Chinese-Box Worlds,” in Postmodernist Fiction (London: Routledge, 1987), 112.
59. Abbott, Cambridge Introduction to Narrative, 101. Julia Kristeva introduced the term “intertextuality” in Julia Kristeva, “Word, Dialogue and Novel” (1966), repr. in The Kristeva Reader, ed. Toril Moi (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 35.
60. Annalis Di Liddo, Alan Moore: Comics as Performance, Fiction as Scalpel (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2009), 27.
61. Ibid., 55.
62. Mikhail Bakhtin, “Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel: Notes towards a Historical Poetics,” in The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by M. M. Bakhtin, ed. Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2000), 84. Bakhtin coined the term “chronotope” for the representation of how time and space are configured, but to avoid further terminological complications, I shall not use “chronotope” in the main text of this article.
63. Ibid., 250.
64. Di Liddo, Alan Moore, 63.
65. Scott McCloud, Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art (New York: HarperPerennial, 1994), 102. As this article focuses on the sequencing between different comic books understood to be in continuity with each other, rather than the sequencing between panels of the same comic book or strip, I shall not examine whether McCloud's understanding of the latter is correct. For a thought-provoking critique, see Neil Cohn, “The Limits of Time and Transitions: Challenges to Theories of Sequential Image Comprehension,” Studies in Comics 1, no. 1 (2010): 127.
66. This terminology derives from the religious notion of a canon. For an early work that draws an analogy between religious scriptures and fictional works in respect of which texts are treated as authoritative, see R. A. Knox, “Studies in the Literature of Sherlock Holmes,” New Blackfriars 1, no. 3 (1920): 154.
67. Molly Hatcher, “The Dark Knight Under Revision,” Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics 4, no. 2 (2013): 257.
68. Ibid., 258. The “Golden Age of Comics” is the seminal era of modern American comic books between the late 1930s and early 1950s, which established many iconic characters, tropes, and archetypes of the superhero genre.
69. Ibid., 259–60.
70. Authers, “What Had Been Many Became One,” 66.
71. Ibid., 74.
72. Ibid., 70.
73. Ibid.
74. Ibid.
75. Ibid., 71, 87.
76. Prior to 2014, all Star Wars materials other than the films were referred to as the “Expanded Universe.” These materials were formally regarded as in continuity with both the films and each other, unless otherwise stated. Following Disney's acquisition of Lucasfilm in 2012 and the decision to produce new films within a period of the Star Wars Universe already covered by existing Expanded Universe materials, the Expanded Universe was “decanonized” in 2014, with the exception of the 2008–14 animated television series The Clone Wars. Consequently, the current official continuity of Star Wars includes the feature films, The Clone Wars, and the various post-2014 novels, comic books, and television series. The works that made up the classic Expanded Universe are now printed under the banner of “Legends.”
77. Since 2012, this editorial body has been the Lucasfilm Story Group.
78. “Off-panel” is the comic book equivalent of the term “off-screen.”
79. Sunstein, World According to Star Wars, 145–59.
80. Di Liddo, Alan Moore, 41.
81. Ibid., 42.
82. The Demon in a Bottle story arc consists of issues #120–28 of The Invincible Iron Man (Marvel Comics, March–November 1979).
83. Authers, “What Had Been Many Became One,” 74.
84. Implied repeal is the doctrine under which the provisions of a newer statute are taken to have repealed those of an older statute if the provisions in question are irreconcilable.
85. Paul Atkinson, “The Graphic Novel as Metafiction,” Studies in Comics 1, no. 1 (2010): 107–125, 112.
86. Authers, “What Had Been Many Became One.”
87. I am somewhat oversimplifying matters since, even if we account for the historical point that the modern system of judicial precedent is an essentially 19th-century invention, there is the further complication that there are multiple common law jurisdictions. These different jurisdictions frequently refer to “the common law” in the abstract and recognize many of the same cases as valid legal sources, but have also developed distinct bodies of case law.
88. To be clear, I am not suggesting that Authers fails to grasp the significance of how the shared universes of Marvel and DC Comics emerged from the unification of pre-existing storyworlds. On the contrary, his inspired choice of comic book example, Crisis on Infinite Earths (DC Comics, April 1985–March 1986), directly explores the issue of storyworld unification in the DC Universe. Rather, my argument is that, between the common law and the EU, the latter is a better example of a new “world” emerging from the unification of previously discrete worlds. At the only point when Authers discusses the analogy between different jurisdictions and different storyworlds explicitly, he suggests that “other jurisdictions might influence the law in one's home regime, but clear distinctions remain between them”; Authers, “What Had Been Many Became One,” 69. Contrastingly, the fundamental point about constitutional pluralism in the EU is that such jurisdictional distinctions are far from clear.
89. One can understand this issue with comparative method as part of the broader “paradox of analysis” in philosophy as to how an analysis can be both correct and informative.
90. Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (London: Macmillan & Co., 1866), 97.
91. Carroll offered this answer in the preface to the 1897 edition of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. At first, he deliberately misspelled “never” as “nevar” to emphasize the play on spelling “raven” backwards.
92. Sampford, Disorder of Law, 91.
93. Indeed, the only other prominent form of storytelling in popular culture characterized by these two qualities that comes to mind is the soap opera, which still lacks the sheer plurality of authors, narrators, and texts that marks comic book storytelling.
94. The Avengers #1 (Marvel Comics, September 1963).
95. Fantastic Four #2 (Marvel Comics, January 1962).
96. Hercules was formally introduced in Journey into Mystery Annual #1 (1965).
97. This is more or less how Marvel has chosen to treat these mythological characters and settings.
98. Neil MacCormick, “Juridical Pluralism and the Risk of Constitutional Conflict,” in MacCormick, Questioning Sovereignty, 118.
99. N. W. Barber, The Constitutional State (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 171. As explained, Barber uses “constitutional pluralism” to denote “the overlap of states and not legal systems,” meaning that much of what this article terms “constitutional pluralism” is what he would term “legal pluralism” (182).
100. Pun intended.
101. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria or Biographical Sketches of My Literary Life and Opinions (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984), ch. 14.
102. Despite the fame of Coleridge's original statement, there has been little in-depth scholarship on suspension of disbelief as a psychological phenomenon. For a rare example, see Anthony J. Ferri, Willing Suspension of Disbelief: Poetic Faith in Film (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2007).
103. Thor was an original member of the team in the first Avengers comic in 1963. Captain America was formally introduced into the then-new Marvel Universe in The Avengers #4 (Marvel Comics, March 1964). The reserve and later honorary member Mar-Vell, also known as Captain Marvel (not to be confused with the Fawcett and later DC Comics character of the same name), was introduced in Marvel Super-Heroes #12 (Marvel Comics, December 1967).
104. Greice Schneider, “Resisting Narrative Immersion,” Studies in Comics 4, no. 2 (2013): 333–354, 337.
105. Timothy D. Peters, “Comic Book Mythology: Shyamalan's Unbreakable and the Grounding of Good in Evil,” Law Text Culture 16 (2012): 243–276, 249.
106. James Campbell, The Hero With a Thousand Faces (London: Fontana, 1993), 30. Campbell borrowed the term “monomyth” from James Joyce, Finnegans Wake (New York: Viking, 1939), 581.
107. Campbell, Hero With a Thousand Faces, 30.
108. Ibid., 36–37.
109. For another discussion of Campbell's work in relation to comic book superheroes, Reynolds argues that Superman comics often conform to Campbell's identified pattern of “atonement with the father” in mythology; Richard Reynolds, Super Heroes: Modern Mythology (London: B. T. Batsford, 1992), 65.
110. While one could take Iron Man to possess the “fatal flaw” of a classical hero (namely his arrogance, which often becomes hubris), I place him closer to a Byronic hero because of his sheer number of flaws and emotionally turbulent personality. For one of many studies of the Byronic hero and its forerunners, see Peter L. Thorslev, The Byronic Hero: Types and Prototypes (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1962).
111. Iron Man's origin story is told in Tales of Suspense #39 (March 1963). Note that, initially, Stark was captured during the Vietnam War, but this has been periodically changed retroactively (“retconned”) to more recent conflicts due to Stark not ageing within the Marvel Universe's “floating timeline.” As of 2016, the conflict in question is the 2001 War in Afghanistan.
112. Captain America's origin story is told in Captain America Comics #1 (Marvel Comics, March 1941), with only minor variations introduced since his 1964 integration into the Marvel Universe.
113. For instance, Jung famously interpreted archetypes as universal characters within the collective unconscious, representing fundamental motifs and symbolizing basic motivations; Carl Jung, “The Archetypes of the Collective Unconsciousness,” in The Collected Works of CG Jung, Vol 9(1) (London: Routledge, 1991).
114. Such Dworkin-inspired theorists include Matthias Kumm and Former Advocate General Miguel Poiares Maduro; Mattias Kumm, “Constitutional Supremacy and the Constitutional Treaty,” European Law Journal 11, no. 3 (2005): 262; Miguel Poiares Maduro, “Contrapunctual Law: Europe's Constitutional Pluralism in Action,” in Sovereignty in Transition, ed. Neil Walker (Oxford: Hart, 2003), 501. “Contrapunctual” is a (possibly erroneous) variant of “contrapuntal,” meaning “of or relating to counterpoint.” For some examples of EU general principles, see Case T-115/94 Opel Austria GmbH v Council of the European Union [1997] ECR II-39 (legal certainty and legitimate expectations); Case 8-55 Fédération Charbonnière de Belgique v High Authority of the European Coal and Steel Community [1954] ECR 245 (proportionality).
115. The X-Men were introduced in The X-Men #1 (Marvel Comics, September 1963).
116. For instance, the X-Men villain Scarlet Witch was introduced in X-Men #4 (Marvel Comics, March 1964) and, after reforming into a hero, joined The Avengers in The Avengers #16 (Marvel Comics May 1965).
117. Since, unlike classical superheroes, American superheroes tend to incorporate elements of Otherness (such as bestial characteristics or a foreign origin), mutants in the Marvel Universe are an interesting example of superheroic characters who experience a double “otherizing”; Clare Pikethly, “The Pursuit of Identity in the Face of Paradox: Indeterminacy, Structure and Repetition in Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman,” Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics 3, no. 2 (2012): 215–221, 216.
118. Brunner.
119. Gauweiler.
120. Dworkin, Law's Empire, 228–38.
121. Cover, “Nomos and Narrative,” 5.
122. Ibid.
123. Ibid., 6–7. Cover identified two kinds of nomos: “insular” and “redemptive.” As their names suggest, an insular nomos establishes and pursues autonomy of meaning within its own realm of association, whereas a redemptive nomos’ vision of the social order requires “a transformational politics that cannot be contained within the autonomous insularity of the association itself”; ibid., 34.
124. Ibid., 9. This is tension between reality and vision provides one potential understanding of Clifford Geertz's characteristically enigmatic description of law as “part of a distinctive manner of imagining the real”; Clifford Geertz, “Local Knowledge: Fact and Law in Comparative Perspective,” in Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretive Anthropology (New York: Basic, 1983), 173.
125. Cover, “Nomos and Narrative,” 16.
126. Ibid., 54.
127. For instance, ibid., 4: “For every constitution there is an epic, for each decalogue a scripture.”
128. In fairness to Cover, his discussion of the Bible captures a great deal of this complexity, but even this part of his analysis remains somewhat thin on references to literary concepts, thereby leaving the “narrative” aspect of “Nomos and Narrative” comparatively underdeveloped; ibid., 19–25.
129. The way that deeper commonalities in law fulfill a comparable function to tropes and archetypes in fiction places Cover's observations about the advantage of having “[t]he principles that establish the nominal autonomy of a community […] resonate with the sacred stories of other communities that establish overlapping or conflicting normative worlds” in a new and interesting light; ibid., 33.
130. Cover, “Nomos and Narrative,” 9.
131. Ibid., 39.
132. This point is present, but not entirely developed, in E. P. Thompson's famous defense of the Rule of Law against superstructuralist critiques of law as an ideological mask for oppression and inequality. In other words, even if law began as a confidence trick by the ruling class, in order for the confidence trick to succeed, it must contain elements that people will find appealing, such as the promise of equality before the law. Thus, law provides an aspirational vision of how a society could exist; E. P. Thompson, Whigs & Hunters: The Origin of the Black Act (London: Breviary Staff, 2013), 205; Jeremy Waldron, The Law (London and New York: Routledge, 1990), 23.
133. I take the term “living tree” from the Canadian constitutional law doctrine of the same name established in Edwards v Attorney General of Canada [1930] AC 124 (PC), denoting how judges can interpret a constitution to adapt to changing times.
134. In one amusing take on the living-tree analogy, “the trunk is rooted by the Constitution, planted by the People, but the branches are tended to by SCOTUS, which controls the direction and height of the Constitution's eventual growth”; Charlie Eastaugh, “Out of Sight, Out of Mind: Is Solitary Confinement Offensive to the Evolving Standards of the US Constitution's Eighth Amendment?” (Ph.D. thesis, University of Surrey, Guildford, 2016), 51. To avoid fetishizing the metaphor, I shall not extend it any further here.
135. Incidentally, this is why I regard attempts to understand law by way of analogy with features of the physical world as fundamentally misguided. For instance, numerous works (some published and others which will likely never see the light of day) attempt to conceptualize recurring patterns in law in terms of “fractals,” which are extensively or infinitely self-similar and iterated constructs, such as the structure of a snowflake; Andrew Stumpff Morrison, “The Law is a Fractal: The Attempt to Anticipate Everything,” Loyola University Chicago Law Journal 44 (2013): 649; David G. Post and Michael B. Eisen, “How Long is the Coastline of the Law? Thoughts on the Fractal Nature of Legal Systems,” Journal of Legal Studies 29 (2000): 545; Alan L. Durham, “The Fractal Geometry of Invention,” Boston College Law Review 53 (2012): 489. While interesting, fractals are of limited heuristic value to legal theory because such recurring patterns in the natural world are understood to have a “brute” existence, irrespective of human perception. Contrastingly, law is a social construct arising from a culturally informed practice: it does not exist prior to the collective act of interpretation.
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Daniel Davison-Vecchione
Daniel Davison-Vecchione is a Ph.D. candidate at the Department of Sociology, University of Cambridge, UK. [email protected]; @dejdavisonvec (Twitter); https://uk.linkedin.com/in/davisonvecchione (LinkedIn)