Normativity and the Political form P.

853-859

1. There is a difference between classroom law and real life law.

a. Real life law is not a system of theories and rules but rather a power game.
b. The power game is built upon the want by lawyers, clients and courts to
get more of what they want.
c. This can be excited for the student-lawyer as long as they believe that they
are in control.
d. Practicing lawyers experience law a complex network of bureaucratic
power arrangements that they have learned to manipulate.
e. It’s law, it’s power
2. We are told to ask questions like: what should be done? How should we live?
What should the law be
a. These are the wrong questions.

3. Normative Legal thought

a. Tends to concern itself with only with its “substantive” propositional
normative content and its own normatively sanctioned uses.
i. Its significance is self-determined.

b. NLT tends to assume that is own “substantive” propositional content

somehow controls the way in which normative legal is used and the way
in which people are kicked around.
c. Problem is: the current structure of our legal normative statis, precludes us
questioning the processes and mechanic of its use.
d. What is authentic behavior when in a bureaucratic system behavior is
already known, and there is no reference to compare it.
e. There are shapes and forces in place that shape our thought that remain
unconscious. There is unwillingness by legal thinkers to consider the
scene of their thought even when such a move would seem at once
intellectually obvious and obviously beneficial.

4. Why we never question the mechanic of our thinking

a. We presuppose that we are all sovereign individual subjects who chose
their own discursive positions and thought processes and announce these
positions within a self sufficient and weightless medium of
communications.
b. Our though and theater is constructed in a way to make critical reflexive
turns unthinkable.
c. We are simply not capable of even entertaining the requisite doubts to
investigate how we are socially and rhetorically constructed.

5. It is ok to feel assaulted by this article

a. This requires us to question our self image
b. We have almost lost the capacity and enlightment to question.
c. Legal thinking becomes subordinated to political value commitments.
d. Legal thought has become a balancing job between the political
viewpoints, this has lowered it to a control device and nothing more.
e. What we get is a kind of intellectual syndicalism in which the
jurisprudential order is maintained and the intellectual or research agenda
is stabilized by an ironic yet tacit agreement among openly antagonistic
parties, no one chooses this state of affairs.