Law is Myth

Abstract

Any title for this paper beginning with the words “law as...” would have been inappropriate. I mean the titles like “law as set of rules” or “is law a system of rules?” (Dworkin), “law as command”(all the Austinian tradition up to Hart), “law as morality” (even in Fuller’s sense), “law as the will of ruling classes”(Marxists), “law as text” (it was my own dissertation) or even “law as myth” (that is the closest we can get to the real topic of this paper). And there is a reason for that. Any title among the ones named in the previous sentence suggests that law is actually something else and that it is just only has one aspect of its being as command, text, system of rules or whatever. (Like: law is something else as well but we can deal with it as with the command of the ruler too.) My point here is much less compromising: law just is THE myth. There are some other myths too but basically law is nothing more (and nothing less!) than myth. And later I suggest that although the term “myth” itself on the emotional level refers us back to something old and ancient – ancient gods of Mount Olympus under Zeus or to the campfires of American Indians and their medical men – law being myth and nothing else is a phenomenon that starts to correspond adequately to the society when and if the latter reaches the stages of post-Modernistic development and passes the revolution of Internet. What I am trying to show in this at first is: (a) law has to be a text; (b) law is a non-linear text; (c) non-linear text is myth.