Arkadiusz Barut

Application of the Transmission Easement Regulations as an Example of the ‘State of Exception’ Law

Dr hab. Arkadiusz Barut

University of Wroclaw

Abstract: The subject of the article is an analysis of civil courts’ case law in terms formulated by Giorgio Agamben and Judith Butler, that is, in terms of law as a ‘state of exception’, a purely arbitrary practice that appears to be a parody of law. The author indicates aspects of such ‘law’: the blurring of the boundaries between the law and purely factual activities (in Agamben’s terminology: ‘life’), which may take the form of violence that no longer cares for its legitimacy or which reduces the law to ‘pure form’, that is, the creation and application of rules completely in abstract from their ethical evaluation and social consequences. In Foucault’s terminology, both these processes can be represented as a rebirth of sovereignty in the field of governmentality, the parody of the law being justified by the needs of population management, but in reality it is the result of a power’s strive for self-preservation. There are, as Butler defines, petty sovereigns who allegedly only quasi-technically apply the law articulated in full in the statute, and in fact act fully arbitrarily. One of their methods is to simulate the creation or application of law by taking away a particular meaning from words, in particular from legal concepts. The result is a departure from the idea of separation of powers and the postulate of empowerment of the addressee of legal norms, sometimes preserving the fiction of the latter’s agency as a kind of Agamben’s ‘pure form of law’. The author states that an example of such a process is the case law of the Polish Supreme Court and general courts regarding the possibility of acquisitive prescription of transmission easement by transmission companies. He indicates that the position that won in this case law completely deviates from the contents of the statute and the well-established understanding of civil law concepts, with the result of depriving property owners of their legal rights.

Keywords: state of exception, Agamben, Butler, transmission easement

Language: Polish

Received: 31.10.2018
Accepted: 23.03.2019

Published: Number 1(19)/2019, pp. 5-14

DOI: https://doi.org/10.36280/AFPiFS.2019.1.5

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Court as the incarnation of the People. Deconstruction of the idea of popular constitutionalism

Dr Arkadiusz Barut

University of Wrocław

English abstract: The subject of this article is an analysis of the idea of popular constitutionalism formulated in American philosophy of law. The starting point for the author is to identify the lack of legitimacy of contemporary government, and consequently its product – the positive law. The solution to this problem is supposed to be the idea of deliberative politics, based on social discussion and responsive law, created through the activity of many subjects, reflecting differentiated identities and ways of seeing the world. Deliberative politics and the responsiveness of law may, however, mean either a social reality, real discussion on law and politics, or a regulatory idea which the activities of elite bodies may advance. In American philosophy of law, the idea that popular constitutionalism was to respond to the postulate of legitimisation of the law by providing the public, and in particular, representatives of ’new social movements‘ such as ‘the civil rights movement‘ in the 1960s, direct participation in its creation and application, was an expression of concern also expressed by the authors of the left in the face of the law-making judgments of the Warren Court. The reformulation of this idea, made in particular by Bruce Ackerman, or its identification with American Supreme Court’s jurisprudence, is an expression of a change in understanding or even deconstruction of fundamental political and legal ideas such as representation and democracy. The consequence is the detachment of the concept of the People from a relation to a particular empirical community. This process appears as an aspect of the ideological phenomenon that goes beyond the American context, i.e. legitimacy, according to the criterion of realizing the slogan of protection of human rights, of elitist bodies. The examples are: the conceptions of Pierre Rosanvallon, and Dominique Rousseau. The author of the article points out the dangers of this movement. The radical shifting of the meaning of words causes irrationalisation of public discourse, and the legitmisation of the role of played by constitutional court as a defender of human rights can exclude all possibilities
of the criticism of its lawmaking.

Keywords: philosophy of law, theory of democracy, popular constitutionalism, Bruce Ackerman

Language: Polish

Received: 22.05.2017
Accepted: 08.08.2017

Published: Number 2(15)/2017, pp. 13-25.

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Number of downloads: 344