TPCS 14: The rubber bands are broken; opening the ‘punctualized’ European administration of justice

By Paul van den Hoven

Thesis

Currently the platform of the Dutch administration of justice can appropriately be characterized as unstable. This instability is analyzed by the judicial professionals themselves as a series of separate defects, each requiring an adequate measure of the institution itself to solve the problem. None of the problems really raises doubt about the fundamental legitimacy of the institution and none of the measures really affects its fundamentals.

This response fits into the analysis that Bruno Latour has made of the French Conseil d’État. Many aspects of his analysis are meaningful for continental European legal institutions in general. Paradigmatic are his observations on the construction of a seemingly controversial decision. I quote a few lines. Writing about a commissioner of law, Latour observes: “He wants the judges to ‘make a significant move’ while asking them to do nothing more than ‘draw the consequences’ of ‘their’ decisions of 1906!” (p.187), “making them say nothing other than what they have always said, even if it was not clearly today” (p.188), “the only thing that is supposed to have happened is the clear affirmation of something that had already existed” (p.191), “everything has changed and yet nothing has changed at all” (p.191). 

Latour compares the modernistic Enlightenment institution of the Law with that other one, Science. “[U]nlike scientists, who dream about overturning a paradigm […] commissioners of the law invariantly present their innovations as the expression of a principle that was already in existence, so that even when it deeply transforms the corpus of […] law it is ‘even more’ the same as it was before” (p.219).

In this brief paper the speculative thesis is explored that in our era of digital connectivity, the remarkable capacity of a legal institution to absorb a huge amount of social dynamics as if it is a priori already present in a closed, ‘punctualized’ institution, leads to a serious loss of public legitimacy. The main argument is that such response to alternative, ‘rich’ narratives isolates the institution in an era in which digital technology creates actants that make such isolation untenable.

Keywords: digital connectivity, legal institution, Latour, Dutch administration of justice. 

How to quote: van den Hoven, P. J. (2011). The rubber bands are broken: Opening the ‘punctualized’ European administration of justice. (Tilburg Papers in Culture Studies; No. 14).

Read the full working paper here: The rubber bands are broken; opening the ‘punctualized’  European administration of justice.