Law's Rule: Liberia and the Rule of Law

Abstract

Law’s rule is animated by an irresolvable contradiction. By definition ‘the rule of law’ is opposed to ‘the rule of humans’; and yet law remains an inter-subjective phenomenon, enlivened by the very humans over whom it would rule. Thus the rule of law, set against the rule of humans, cannot be instituted in a way that finally separates law from its subjects. This problem is a familiar one. In political theory, it underlies the paradox of how both law-maker and made-law can be sovereign at the same time. In legal theory, it underlies the concern over how judges, as the ultimate authority of law, can render impartial, dispassionate—objective—legal decisions, in service of the rule of law. For sociologists and anthropologists, and those working in the fields of peace-building and development, it underlies the debate over how to institute a legal order that upholds the rule of law in socially diverse situations. In addressing this problem, the thesis takes up the challenge set down by Desmond Manderson in Kangaroo Courts and the Rule of Law (2012): to take seriously the contradiction in the rule of law as its animating condition. This means approaching the contradiction, not as a problem to be resolved, but as the very index of the life of law’s rule. However, whilst the humanities provide the means, and literature the locus, of Manderson’s seminal study, the social sciences provide the primary means of this thesis, with Liberia as its locus. Thus it is by asking the question, what takes place in the rule of law?, and more specifically, what is taking place in the rule of law in Liberia?, that the thesis undertakes a study of the life of law’s rule in a country that is on the frontline of the global spread of powerful ideologies. With Theodor Adorno’s negative-dialectical philosophy as guide, and based on fieldwork carried out in Liberia and the United States in 2013, the thesis examines how these ideologies inform the rule of law, and how the rule of law provides a medium for them to take place. Part I begins with a reading of Adorno’s negative-dialectical philosophy (Chapter 1), before examining the origins of the contradiction as a condition of law (Chapter 2), to show how this opens the rule of law to animation by different logics which inform how it takes place (Chapter 3). Part II then moves to Liberia to examine how the rule of law is taking place there, mediated by the logics of capital (Chapter 4), security (Chapter 5), and liberalism (Chapter 7), whilst providing a medium for these logics to take place. Critically, however, the thesis also shows how the rule of law and its institutional logics do not become identical, leaving the rule of law open to take place otherwise (Chapter 6). The thesis concludes by returning to the question of what this means for the rule of law in theory and in the practice of trying to institute it around the world.