Richard Weisberg - „Legal Reasoning's Inherent Flexibility as a Risk to Affirmative Cultural Stability“

Abstract:

Across most cultures, one norm regarding law is generally accepted: its predictability. Even in totalitarian states, and certainly as we move towards liberal democracies, law is thought to prescribe identifiable modes of behavior, some acceptable and others subject to civil or criminal punishment. The predictability of law is thought to derive from written codes and/or judge-made declarations, but people also become aware of predictable deviations from "law on the books", so that (for example) the presence of constitutional-level protective norms in places like the former Soviet Union or in contemporary China, readily yields in public perception to predictable patterns of law enforcement that directly violate those norms. In more democratically oriented cultures, people ascertain that some laws are simply not enforced ("desuetude") or mean something different from their "textual" sense (you can drive at 70 miles per hour where the sign says "Limit: 55 mph", etc). Thus, at some cost, predictability is maintained.

Cyclically, however, challenges are mounted − either internally (through "autopoiesis") or externally (through, say, civil disobedience) − to the norm of legal predictability. Since World War II, such attacks have branded "positivism" as the source of much wrongdoing in Hitler's Europe and have deduced that a knee-jerk allegiance to laws of whatever kind brings about awful harm when those laws, albeit predictably applied, are morally wrong. Similarly, in the United States, the great judicial reversal of Jim Crow laws that occurred in BROWN vs. BOARD OF EDUCATION was lauded as an example of judicial departure from "predictability" − neither the text nor the history of the "equal protection clause" mandated the outcome, yet precisely the unpredictability of the Court's methods was thought of as admirable, given the required outcome of ending apartheid in America. Academic discourse until perhaps BUSH vs GORE largely although along a spectrum of discourse embraced the move from predictable judicial behavior in the service of doubtful or even repugnant ends. Critical Legal Studies overtly made the claim that predictability was itself a doubtful notion, and that all meanings (legal and otherwise) are indeterminate, this being itself an exaggerated outgrowth of the "realist" movement a few decades earlier.

This paper re-captures legal predictability as a laudable norm. It does not re-create the positive-natural law dichotomies of the immediate post-war period except in demonstrating at some length that the enormity of legal harm in Hitler's Europe occurred because of judges' felt liberation from, and not enslavement to, legal norms. Here, my examples are Nazi courts themselves, and developments in Vichy France and in the occupied Channel Islands. Instead the paper adopts the principle of "flexiphobia" − a neologism indicating the extreme risks of excessive textual flexibility -- and applies it to three American Supreme Court decisions (PLESSY vs FERGUSON (1896), which was over-ruled by BROWN, SCHENCK (1919) and HELLER (2008), as well as to "landlord-tenant" cases from Vichy France and the recent "Esra" decision (2007) from the German High Court.

A conclusion emerges that: 1) law does yield predictable results, that 2) flawed but basically sound legal systems do better by preserving interpretive predictability while permitting change through intense political struggle (racial equality, gender, reproductive and sexual rights, environmental protection) largely working within the system and 3) in totalitarian environments, the very predictability of law eventually encourages recourse to expanded jurisdictional authority (international courts, acting with predicability) or outright revolution.

Prof. Dr. Richard H. Weisberg

Floersheimer Professor of Constitutional Law, Cardozo Law School, Yeshiva University

Zur Person:

Richard H. Weisberg studierte zunächst Vergleichende Literaturwissenschaften und Französisch an der Brandeis University in Boston und erwarb 1970 den Doctor of Philosophy an der Cornell University. Anschließend arbeitete er als Assistant Professor an der University of Chicago und erlangte 1974 den Juris Doctor an der Columbia Law School. Seit 1977 ist er Floersheimer Professor of Constitutional Law der Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law an der Yeshiva University in New York City. Während der letzten Jahre lehrte Richard H. Weisberg als Gastprofessor unter anderem in Los Angeles, Jerusalem und Vancouver. Seine Forschungsschwerpunkte liegen im Themengebiet Recht und Literatur sowie in den Bereichen des Verfassungs- und des Vermögensrechts. Darüber hinaus beschäftigt er sich intensiv mit dem Vichy-Regime und dessen antisemitischer Rechtsrhetorik und Gesetzgebung.

Richard H. Weisberg ist Beauftragter des Weißen Hauses für die Commission on the Preservation of America's Heritage Abroad. Zudem setzte er sich in seiner Tätigkeit als Anwalt vor den US-Bundesgerichten für die Rechte und Entschädigungen der Holocaustüberlebenden und deren Hinterbliebenen ein. Er ist Gründungsdirektor des Cardozo Program on Holocaust / Human Rights Studies sowie des Floersheimer Center for the Study of Constitutional Democracy und gilt als ein Pionier der weltweiten Law and Literature-Bewegung. Im Jahr 2008 wurde Richard H. Weisberg vom französischen Präsidenten Nicolas Sarkozy mit dem Ordre national de la Légion d'honneur geehrt. Er war unter anderem Fellow der John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation sowie der Rockefeller Foundation und ist seit 1988 Herausgeber der Zeitschrift Cardozo Studies in Law and Literature.

Zu seinen wichtigsten Publikationen gehören neben zahlreichen Aufsätzen die weithin übersetzten Werke "The Failure of the Word: The Protagonist as Lawyer in Modern Fiction" (1984), "When Lawyers Write" (1987) sowie "Poethics, And Other Strategies of Law and Literature" (1992) und das 1996 erschienene "Vichy Law and the Holocaust in France". Im Dezember 2012 wird sein neues Buch „Recht und Literatur“ in deutscher Sprache im Suhrkamp Verlag (stw) erscheinen.