Goodrich, Peter --- "Interstitium and Non-law" [2012] ELECD 586; in Monateri, Giuseppe Pier (ed), "Methods of Comparative Law" (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2012)

Book Title: Methods of Comparative Law

Editor(s): Monateri, Giuseppe Pier

Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing

ISBN (hard cover): 9781849802529

Section: Chapter 10

Section Title: Interstitium and Non-law

Author(s): Goodrich, Peter

Number of pages: 17

Extract:

10. Interstitium and non-law
Peter Goodrich*



Modern law is understood overwhelmingly as a structure. The English jurist Blackstone
nicely coined the term establishment to describe not simply the legal status quo ante,
institute and institutions, but also the implicit desirability of observing and obeying our
directors, priests, professors, judges and lawyers. Legal structure connotes hierarchy and
the accompanying beneficence of the invisible, of sources both absent and above. The
sovereign (super-anus), after all, is one who sits above and it is that feature of distance and
overlooking, of detachment and supervision that best captures the innately modernist legal
drive to abstraction and universality, to a law in nubibus, which aerial and absconded being
so troubles and exercises the comparative lawyer.
The longue durée of nomos is paradoxically the narrative of a trajectory towards
virtuality. The paradox lies in the fact that, as Vico observed, nomos was originally of the
earth and catalogued appropriation, division, locality and difference rather than the
extraterritoriality and angelology that Roman jurisprudence cunningly flung to the West-
ern mob. Law as corpus, the Latin body, norm as institution and personality ­ aetas,
scientia, mores et ordo in the Anglican ecclesiastical vocabulary ­ signifies geometrical
measure and general rule, doctrine and universality, axiom and order rather than corpor-
eality, place and comparison. If there is a modus, a method and melody to the angst of
comparative law, a theme that conjoins the grand and merry men of situated difference, it
is that of the singular universal, ...