Seizing Sovereignty: The Law of its Image
| Author | Bert Van Roermund |
| Date | 01 September 2002 |
| Published date | 01 September 2002 |
| DOI | 10.1177/096466390201100307 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
SEIZING SOVEREIGNTY:
THE LAW OF ITS IMAGE
BERT VAN ROERMUND
University of Tilburg, the Netherlands
INTRODUCTION
IDON’T THINK I ever seized the law. Or did I? There is this book I
never thought of buying but which came to my shelves anyway. I
remember seizing, indeed rescuing it, from the left belongings of an old
Greek lawyer who fled his post at Tilburg University to escape from his
creditors, sometime in the mid-1980s. He certainly must have lost the belief
that ‘man can create the world and change it and that the possibilities of liber-
ation lie in each person’s grasp. That, potentially at least, man is a free and
creative being and, because of this, can break out of society which stultifies
him’ (Ban´kowski and Mungham, 1976: 112). Law, this book said on many of
its pages, plays a major role in the stultifying tactics of modern capitalist
society: it reifies human relationships so that they can be manipulated as data
for quasi-science and false consensus. Yet, remarkably enough, the book
refrained from advocating revolution to counteract all this in the name of
freedom. It advocated an oblique kind of creativity in law. Focusing on the
trial, for instance, it argued that ‘there are actions in the trial itself, which can,
given the right epistemology, be shown to be the self-conscious political
activity of men’. Indeed, this book did not want to abolish law; it did not
even want an ‘alternative’ sort of law, as the leftist idiosyncracies of the time
demanded. Its plea was one for ‘creative’ law-making and law-breaking. This
plea was, and still is, entirely right. Legal theorists should never stop asking
what counts as creative in the creation of law. Thus, when I seized this book,
taking it from a sad pile of stuff left behind in the corner of an empty room,
in hindsight I may have seized the law of the law.
Rereading Images of Law is an enjoyable experience. But, honestly, there
would be no reason to write about it if the reward would be limited to the
‘those were the days’ feelings of a few 50-something academics. What justi-
fies writing is the theoretical challenge Images constitutes in our time. What
is this challenge, and how to respond to it? ‘Seize the time’ Images says at a
SOCIAL &LEGAL STUDIES 0964 6639 (200209) 11:3 Copyright © 2002
SAGE Publications, London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi,
Vol. 11(3), 395–403; 027070
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