Law as the Continuation of God by Other Means

Abstract

Introduction: This paper analyzes the formal structure of argumentation in contemporary legal theory. It traces how secular legal scholars, in their efforts to substantiate the existence of a “desired X” (such as legal objectivity, the autonomy of the self, or the progressive evolution of doctrine), unwittingly replicate classical theological models of reasoning and proofs for the existence of God.Methods: The study employs a comparative analysis of legal argumentation and theological constructs. The author juxtaposes the concepts of Joseph Beale, Owen Fiss, Margaret Jane Radin, and Jack Balkin against the cosmological, teleological (argument from design), and ontological proofs of God’s existence, drawing upon Kantian critique of the substitution of the ontological for the epistemic.Results and Discussion: The analysis reveals that legal scholars’ attempts to stabilize desired normativity inevitably involve a magical leap from thought to being. The first part demonstrates how Joseph Beale uses the logic of the “prime mover,” akin to Aquinas’s proof, to justify the self-evolution of the common law. The second part shows how Owen Fiss, in defending the objectivity of interpretation, postulates the existence of an “interpretive community” and “disciplining rules” based on the argument from design model. The third part elucidates how the defense of the autonomous “self” by modern theorists structurally repeats the Cartesian cogito and the ontological proof, failing to transcend the linguistic act to reach ontological reality. The author concludes that this substitution is not an error but a constitutive gesture of law as a system that requires the illusion of objectification to maintain its authority.Conclusions: Law appears as a discourse suffering from a chronic deficit of ontological grounding and is therefore compelled to continuously reproduce theological structures of thought. Continuing to “do law” after the debunking of its metaphysical foundations is as problematic as continuing worship after the “death of God.” The shift from the epistemic to the ontological is not a logical failure but a necessary condition for the very idea of the rule of law.