Law as the New Religion

I’ve been reading this book “Law’s Quandary” for sometime now and thought I’d share some of the interesting discussions mentioned in the
book about the relationship between law as the religion of people (particulary in the US tradition). I’ve had discussions with my friends about our impressions of this feeling and the author of the book details this theory in full.

In the gist of the two arguments he lays out for the view of the law
as this new religion of people, the first:

Is this persistance in the practice of law as the people’s new
religion but NOT in the metaphysical premises that seem necessary to
support the practice. To shift the religious vocabulary, if
contemporary law is a species of idolatry, it is a peculiar and
confusing sort of idolatry in which the devotees regulary deny that
the idol has the transcendent qualities it would need to justify the
uses they make of it.

This confusing condition leads to considering the second, not only
different but almost opposite possible view: Could it be that at some
level legal practitioners do sincerely believe in “the law,’ and that
if they are guilty of ‘bad faith,’ their misrepresentation or
self-deception occurs not when they engage in the practice an
discourse of the law but rather when they consciously or explicity
disavow its metaphysical commitments? Meaning, while lawyers and
judges might be in ‘bad faith’ when they engage in practice of law,
their overall behavior seems more consistent with the hypothesis that
self-deception occurs when they engage in explicit theorizing about
law- and when in the course of such theorizing they deny the
metaphysical commitments that they in fact hold.

Interesting huh? Not many lawyers, judges, or even Americans view
their legal system in such a light… and this isn’t even comming from
a Muslim but thier own legal theorist.

Dostoevsky made a similar point when he said, ” Man cannot exist
without bowing before something…. Let him reject God, and he will
bow before an idol.”