Berge on Ancient Greek Nomos and Modern Legal Theory @berge_lukas

Lukas van den Berge, Utrecht University Faculty of Law, is publishing Ancient Greek Nomos and Modern Legal Theory: A Reappraisal in the Netherlands Journal of Legal Philosophy (2021). Here is the abstract.

Recently, two books have appeared that venture to re-investigate modern legal theory's ancient Greek underpinnings. In both books, the notion of nomos plays a central role. Firstly, Thanos Zartaloudis has published a remarkable study in which he delves into the manifold meanings of that ancient Greek word. Zartaloudis offers us an extraordinarily rich analysis of the polyvalent forms and uses of nomos from the age of Homer up to the days of Socrates – the classical period in which nomos would finally come to acquire its sense of an enacted legal norm (‘law’) or binding social convention (‘custom’). Secondly, nomos is of central importance in Johan van der Walt’s recent book on the intertwined modern notions of liberal democracy and the rule of law – referred to by Van der Walt as the concept of liberal democratic law. For Van der Walt, the analysis of ancient Greek nomos and its long and tortuous reception history in western thought is crucial for a proper understanding of what the modern concept of liberal democratic law entails and how it could be saved for the future.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

van den Berge on Law, King of All: Schmitt, Agemben, Pindar @UtrechtUni

Lukas van den Berge, Utrecht University, is publishing Law, King of All: Schmitt, Agamben, Pindar in volume 13 of Law and Humanities (2019). Here is the abstract.

Both Carl Schmitt and Giorgio Agamben draw on the ancient Greek concept of nomos as an important element underpinning their legal theories. Aiming to restore that concept to its pre-sophistic meaning, they grant central weight to a piece of poetry in which Pindar famously proclaims that ‘law (nomos) is king of all’, guiding both mortals and immortals while ‘justifying the utmost violence with a powerful hand’. For Schmitt as for Agamben, this means that the Pindaric fragment exposes the violent origins of law that normativist jurisprudence typically shields from view. For one thing, I will explain in this article why Schmitt’s and Agamben’s use of the fragment is at odds with any acceptable interpretation of it in its wider literary and historical context. More importantly, perhaps, my aim is ultimately to reconstruct a Pindaric jurisprudence as it should actually be preferred to that of both Schmitt and Agamben.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.