Special Workshop Abstracts

Special Workshop Title:	Law and Objectivity - Legal Positivism, Critical Theory and the New Wave of Natural Law
Author:	Christian Hiebaum, Graz
Paper Title:	Law, Politics, and Objectivity
Abstract:	There are many Critical Legal Theorists who think of law as a thoroughly political enterprise, the outcome of which is wholly dependent on ideology and power. Claims to legal truth, objectivity, and rationality, so the story goes, have to be considered as rhetorical strategies to disguise relations of power and pretensions to power. Instead of discovering legal truths we are constructing them. In some sense I think this is correct. But can we intelligibly conclude that law is politics all the way down? In this paper I want to show the fallacies of such an argument. My reasoning will employ deconstructionist insights as well as arguments developed in recent analytic philosophy of language. You don’t have to follow Habermas, I contend, in order to have weapons against the equation of claims to validity and objectivity with pretensions to power.