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Jour Fixe with Stanislovas Tomas, 18th January 2010
01/08/2010
We are pleased to announce a Jour Fixe presentation by Stanislovas Tomas on the dissertation topic:
“European legal practices as a contemporary form of shamanism” (Discussant: Prof. Christian Calliess)
The Jour Fixe begins at 6 pm (18.00 Uhr st) and takes place at Ihnestr. 26, Room 202.
Abstract
The paper considers the inexistence of law, and defines what the courts of the last instance do as “judicial shamanism”. As a consequence, we replaced the word “judge” with “shaman”, “legal principle” and “rule” with “spirit”, the concepts of “Treaty, legal act, Article, case law, document, directive, regulation” with the concept of an “amulet where the spirits live”. After framing this analytical structure, we started to analyse empirically what the shamans of the European Court of Justice and the European Court of Human Rights do with the spirits, and came to the conclusion that one can distinguish 97 judicial techniques of interpretation that can be divided into over 400 variants. This is an industrial technology of how the European adjudication functions. There are no substantial differences between what the European judges and the Siberian or Voodoo shamans do.
Then, we turn to the role of the philosophy of law, and asked what is its purpose. Since the objective of philosophy of law is to convince the reader to start using certain interpretative techniques and legal conclusions, we assimilated the philosophy to commercial advertising of judicial shamanism. In this perspectives we distinguished 2 grand strategies of advertising and 21 advertising techniques of which philosophy of law consists at the empirical level. This helps us to understand how the sub-market of philosophy of law functions. There are no substantial differences among advertisings of judicial shamanisms, Coca Cola, condoms Durex, or Pepsi Cola.
