Session 6: Trial Practice Workshop: A Criminal Case

This is because, nevertheless, the rule of legislation is interpreted as a tool that serves the interests of the powerful; furthermore, it is a gadget that dissembles itself. The rule of law, in its restraint on the exercise of governmental and judicial power, facilitates the aims of those with power of other kinds, significantly financial energy. This is not a surprising argument, if one considers how proper-wing thinkers like Frederick Hayek (1971, fifty seven–9) have lauded the rule of law for its important function in buttressing the free market.

The best of legislation, in distinction, includes a set of establishments that regulate or restrain power with reference to norms of justice. Thus the presence of the ideological in law must, in some sense, compromise legislation’s integrity.

Free Legal Encyclopedia: Purge to Recovered Assets Incentivization Fund (RAIF)

The Marxist view of legislation as ideology dangers, however, an unhelpful reductionism. Conceiving of legislation as ideological above all else within the Marxist sense can promote a crude and erroneous understanding of the relation between energy and legality, the place regulation serves only the interests of the powerful and where authorized guarantees are mere shams. Moreover, this can license a cynicism in regards to the law that’s paradoxically opposite to the emancipatory goals of the novel politics that was the impetus for the critique of regulation as ideology within the first place. That is, radical critics threat dismissing altogether the potential of authorized resources for remedying injustice. The view of legislation as ideology, even in its radical variants, wouldn’t deny the presence of the rule of regulation in the liberal legal order; indeed, the rule of law is commonly invoked as a paradigmatic instance of legal ideology.

We can thus respect authorized ensures of a procedural type for the real safety they provide the themes of the law, while on the similar time conceding the quietist politics that proceduralism may engender. The ‘end of ideology’ thesis, superior by Bell in a triumphalist spirit on behalf of liberal capitalism, but curiously even more salient in Marxist ideals of communism, could be wrong in its assumption that human beings can transcend ideology. Indeed, the novel idea of ideology ultimately casts doubt on the chance that individuals’ beliefs can ever provide an objective account of reality, untainted by distorted and self-justifying processes of inquiry.

Left wing and proper wing thinkers are agreed, then, on the capitalist operate of the rule of regulation. Natural regulation can find popular expression in a society’s ideology, and positivist authorized establishments may reflect ideological beliefs. Thus ideology, far from being a science, as De Tracy contends, or any set of action-oriented beliefs as Bell puts it, is quite inherently conservative, quietist, and epistemically unreliable. Ideology conserves by camouflaging flawed social conditions, giving an illusory account of their rationale or function, to be able to reliable and win acceptance of them.

Indeed, on this view of the ideological position of legislation, in a just society there could be no want for a mystifying account of reality, and thus no need for regulation. The idea of legislation as ideology is thus central to the Marxist view that law will wither away with the total flowering of communism (Sypnowich 1990, ch. 1). Law as ideology directs its topics in methods that are not clear to the subjects themselves; legislation, on this view, cloaks energy.