Alexy Ad Iustitium

Date01 March 2008
Published date01 March 2008
DOI10.1177/0964663907086460
AuthorPeter Goodrich
Subject MatterArticles
ALEXY ADIUSTITIUM
PETER GOODRICH
Cardozo School of Law, New York
KEY WORDS
justice; lexicon; legality; nomination; rhetoric; justice
FOR REASONS that will become apparent subsequently, or not at all, I will
start with an argumentum ad nominem. Alexy, from the Greek alexios,
means defender and hence apologist or polemicist in defense of law.
The latter point is best made anagrammatically. Alexy has lex or law at its
core. Indicatively not any law but ‘a’ lex or law, and as a pref‌ix the initial ‘a’
allows us some choice. It could mean a f‌irst law, or a singular law. More
adventurously, we could be Greek about it and interpret the initial ‘a’ as
meaning ‘away from’ or ‘out of’ law. Alexy then means alegal rather as
atheism means without God. That latter interpretation is nominally too
strong, however, because of the suff‌ix ‘y’, whose primary meaning is that of
‘having the character of’ or ‘being inclined towards’. The suff‌ix thus indicates
a fondness for law, an inclination towards that which should be defended, a
commitment or at the very least an ambivalent attachment to legality. That
is not all; it never is. Taken together, pref‌ix and suff‌ix form ‘ay’, from the
Latin aevum meaning eternity and thus an attention to law in the long term
or sub specie aeternitatis. As the Latin is not much remembered we can be
permitted further to include the more usual vernacular meaning of ‘ay’. Here
it means sorrow or pain, as in the colloquial or comic book ‘ay, ay, ay’. The
root of ‘ay’ as sorrow is the Spanish ay de mi or woe is me. Thus, by exten-
sion, woe is law or sorrow must befall the legal utterance that fails to meet
the correctness criteria of legal discourse as spelled out so lucently in Alexy’s
theory of interpretation.
The name offers a number of possibilities but all are variants upon the
heartland of the word, its lex, its ambivalent desire to be lexy. It is of course
the ambivalence, the polysemy or semantic possibility of the word that is
attractive. The name suggests not simply an attachment to law, but also a
sorrow or affect which questions that attachment and is the overriding f‌igure
SOCIAL &LEGAL STUDIES Copyright © 2008 SAGE Publications
Los Angeles, London, New Delhi and Singapore, www.sagepublications.com
0964 6639, Vol. 17(1), 105–108
DOI: 10.1177/0964663907086460

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