Sherwin on The Challenge of Legal Chorology: Rethinking Political Theology

Richard K. Sherwin, New York Law School, has published The Challenge of Legal Chorology: Rethinking Political Theology as NYLS Legal Studies Research Paper No. 4960463. Here is the abstract.

Liberal democracy has historically been associated with an assumption of neutrality concerning religious or moral feelings and beliefs. Illiberal critics like Carl Schmitt have seized on this assumption to argue that moral neutrality deprives liberal democracy of any claim to legitimation or, for that matter, political coherence. But liberal democracy’s core commitment to a creed of freedom among equals belies this critique. As illiberal forms of governance gain strength worldwide, it is incumbent on allies of freedom to articulate a compelling and comprehensive narrative in its defense. To this end, legal chorology brings to light the historical, cultural, emotional, and spiritual conditions under which ‘constitutive power’ founds, transforms, or sweeps away political and legal states. This originary, generative force exceeds, even as it courses through, the names we assign it throughout history. That unbearable excess (“the sacred”) is the defining feature of constitutional over-beliefs. Constitutional over-beliefs embody different clusters of ideas, beliefs, and affective states around which polities arise and cohere. By tracing the rise and fall of discrete, historically privileged, constitutional over-beliefs, legal chorology holds out the prospect of identifying potent cross- cultural and interreligious resources for political belief and commitment. At the same time, reconceiving political theology as a genealogy of the sacred releases the field from Schmitt’s narrow illiberal vision. Liberal democracy, chorologically construed, rests upon an ethical metaphysic that conceives freedom among equals as an offshoot of each other’s infinite worth. As it turns out, liberal democracy’s ethos of epistemological modesty and experiential openness amidst abundance also emulates the very nature and dynamics of khôra herself.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Ricca on the Interplay of Space and Law: Legal Chorology

Mario Ricca, University of Parma, has published How to Make Space and Law Interplay Horizontally: From Legal Geography to Legal Chorology. Here is the abstract.

This essay addresses the thorny issue of how legal words and spatial experiences interplay. The topic is treated trough the spectrum of the subsidiarity principle and its semantic-spatial implications. This perspective allows for an immediate focus on the cognitive continuities extant between categorical and spatial frames. When a subject (public or private) is considered to be subsidiary with respect to another, then he/she/it is entitled to a substitution, which as such implies a semantic and experiential shifting. This very possibility for shifting/displacement reveals cognitive continuities between word and space in the legal realm and experience. Moving from this view, the essay proposes a different approach to the relationships between legal words and space, assumed as a division of power by contemporary Legal Geography. The method used to define this perspective is precisely “Legal Chorology.” The essay will address its theoretical and practical implications in bridging and dynamically managing the diffraction between law and space. Legal reasoning is thus enhanced by using a semiotic perspective in the analysis of human spatial experience and cognition. The topics addressed range from a discussion of the intertwining of the human activity of categorization and the perception of space, to an assessment of the consequences that a chorological view can engender for classical legal issues such as inheritance law, urban law, contract law, public assistance on behalf of subjects with disabilities, and so on.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Ricca on the Intercultural Use of Human Rights and Legal Chorology

Mario Ricca, University of Parma, has published The Intercultural Use of Human Rights and Legal Chorology. Here is the abstract.

The essay deals with the contested universality of human rights from an intercultural point of view. Such a perspective conflates with the possible use of human rights discourse as a (horizontal) interface to translate different cultural subjectivities. Using this hermeneutical approach, spatial and semiotic proximities inherent to “multiculturality” are capable of showing and triggering renewed geographical and semiotic configurations. “Legal chorology” is the theoretical toolkit proposed here as a means of analyzing the emersion of new categorical and practical spaces of subjectivity.

Download the essay from SSRN at the link.

Ricca on Law, Cultural Categories, and Legal Geographies

Mario Ricca, University of Parma, has published Errant Law: Spaces and Subjects. Here is the abstract.

The essay addresses the following topics: I will talk about the intertwining between cultural categories and spatial categories. The first axis for the analysis will address the interspatial blurring and blending produced by the translating of the individuals through manifold and culturally plural circuits of state/territorial sovereignty. The second axis will focus on the intercultural translation intended as place of convergence and condensation of categorical connotations used by different cultures for marking the space. I will try to show how translating cultures, each into another, by means of law’s spectrum could be equivalent and coextensive with translating different ‘spatialities’, and viceversa. Reaching this interlocutory target allows for the configuration of inter-spaces capable of working as a platform to assure the legal relevance of different culturally oriented subjective agencies. The theoretical toolkit to investigate these topics is “legal chorology”. It will be explained by these sequential steps: a. Legal chorology and a timely intercultural translation. b. Inter-spatial dynamics and cognitive deficiencies of legal qualifications across cultures. Subsequently, I will apply the above considerations to envisage a pluralistic legal approach conceived beyond the exclusive use of inter-normative devices and inter-legality.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.