Johan Van der Walt - The law is clumsy because it is, well, the law
Abstract
"The law is clumsy because it is, well, the law", suggests the title of this talk. It clearly suggests that we cannot expect the law not to be clumsy. The discourse of law is always awkward - not just sometimes - and lawyers (and litigants) must live with this awkwardness, understand it and work with it.
For all this to make sense, we should also ask ourselves: is there a discourse that is not awkward? For if all linguistic discourses are inherently awkward, then none of them really are. At least a minimal element of comparison is necessary to make sense of the statement "law is awkward". This talk will propose a way of considering this comparative element from the point of view of the difference between law and poetry.
It will do so by drawing on the essential argument developed in Professor Van der Walt's book The Literary Exception and the Rule of Law (2023)
Bio
For the third conference, we welcome Johan van der Walt, Professor of Law at the University of Luxembourg. Johan van der Walt is Professor of Philosophy of Law at the University of Luxembourg. He is the author of the monographs Law and Sacrifice (2005), The Horizontal Effect Revolution and the Question of Sovereignty (2014), The Concept of Liberal Democratic Law (2019) and The Literary Exception and the Rule of Law (2023) and of numerous journal articles and chapter contributions to edited volumes.
