Where has the magic gone? Modern legal thought as always had a clumsy and uncomfortable relationship to Max Weber’s famous slogan that modernity is the ‘disenchantment of the world’. Is it really only instrumental rationality that inhabits legal texts? Is there nothing more? Or perhaps less? Or does the specificity of law lie precisely in the strange realisation that its texts are necessarily enchanted, even haunted?
In this first L(S)STS meeting of the 2020-21 season, Peter Burgess will lead a discussion on “the mystical origins of law” (Derrida) and ask whether digitalisation—both in terms of the digitalisation of legal practice and the application of law to digital objects—impede or enhance its sacral character.
This event will take place on ZOOM, the link will be send a few days in advance.