Tyranny and the Death of Law: Code, Money, Equity

This is an in-person only public event that is free of charge, but booking is essential. Venue and further details will be sent to registered attendees ahead of the event.

Event Description:

A body of jurisprudential thought has emerged in the last decade which has predicted fundamental changes to, or even the death of, law as such. On the one hand, technological change is appearing to render certain assumptions about the nature of law obsolete. And on the other, certain other assumptions about the relationship between law and justice, having been under sustained theoretical assault for a century or more, are now very unstable. In this paper, I describe these developments, deliberately provocatively, as gesturing in the direction of tyranny – drawing specifically on the analysis of Xenophon’s Hiero by Leo Strauss in his On Tyranny [1963]. In this text, tyranny emerges as a problem ‘coeval with political life’, and is imagined amongst other things as a critique of law as such: it emerges as a solution to the problem of the gap between law and justice through the prioritisation of the latter at the expense of the former. Thinking of things in this way, I argue, helps us to name and group together distinctive features of contemporary governance, as well as to make predictions about the trajectory of future developments, and in this paper I make some remarks in relation to three particular modalities that can be imagined to be replacing law as the means for governing human conduct, in the interests of justice: code, money, and equity.

About the Speaker:

Dr David McGrogan is an Associate Professor at Northumbria Law School. David received his PhD from the University of Liverpool in 2013; prior to that, he had a career as a legal translator. His chief interest is in the question of the relationship between law and political reason: how law reflects, supports, and shapes the existence of relationships of authority. He is currently writing a book on this subject, labelled Tyranny and Desire, for Polity Press, and he has published widely on public law, human rights law, public international law, and legal theory. His first monograph, Critical Theory and Human Rights: From Compassion to Coercion, was published by Manchester University Press in 2021 (in paperback in 2023), and he was awarded the ICON Prize for Best Paper of 2019 by the International Society of Public Law. He is a Fellow of the Knapp Foundation.