Hannah Adhikari
Intro to Legal Theory
Professor Sitze
1/27/25
LJST
● Not a Pre-Law major
● The study of law as it relates to the liberal arts (an end not a means)
- Rather than wait for a midlife crisis (Seneca), ask yourself now (teleology1)
● Study of law as a problem of moral reasoning
● Comprehension of tensions of modern jurisprudence
● The crisis of modernity
- The emergence of the reformation (16th century) which challenged the idea of a
universal concept of good (various religious groups)
- Infinite civil war, not infinite civil peace
- Not only freedom but obligation to break the law (civil disobedience)
- Newton
a. Laws of physics (departure from Catholic/Protestant medieval beliefs)
- Slavery created moral complications → led to ideas of racial
superiority/inferiority
- Francis Bacon
a. Knowledge is power (an algorithm) → to control your own nature as a
means to the end of human mastery)
b. “What’s the use?” modern version of a cardinal question of classical
formation
c. As opposed to “what is the point/purpose?” (Socrates)
- Modernity is a set of unstable conditions that give rise to a set of logics that are
shot through with tensions, ambiguities, paradoxes, and contradictions (crying out
for our judgement)
a. Always at some level contradict themselves from within (constitutive
imperfections)
b. We all have the concept of the highest good → because we all agree that
we know that we don’t know what the highest good is (otherwise we are
dogmatists)
c. The tolerant always have to be intolerant of the intolerant2
- Exercise realism, precision, etc.
● Accidents of birth should not determine life chances3
1
explanation of phenomena in terms of the purpose they serve rather than of the cause by which they
arise
2
Jesus with the Pharisees and religious leaders
3
J.S. Mill’s “The Subjection of Women,” 1859.
, - Accidents are not arbitrary but essential (race, gender, sexuality, etc.)
- We are not born equal (despite what the DOI says)
● Separation of Power
- Nation-states4 such as South Africa
- The secularization of power
a. Separation of church and state (1st Amendment) → did not exist for
different religious sects in medieval times
- Printing press → only a law when it is codified
● Gossip = litigation against a paper whose author is not there to defend it (read it as
though the author were here in the room)
- The liberal arts are not about gossip but about confronting your decisions on their
own terms in a robust way
● Frederick Douglass
- The Constitution is tainted and should not be touched by Christians
- The Constitution is beautiful (but still tainted?)
● Laserbeam reading (45 on/15 off)
- Green light: could explain to someone not in the class
- Yellow light: I don’t know
- Red light: I am lost and this makes no sense (Kant)
- Pre-reading
a. Flip through
b. Ask yourself the purpose of what you are reading
c. Get through a couple sections, but really get through them
Hobbes, On the Citizen, Section 1: Liberty
● On the State of Man without Civil Society
- First foundation of natural Right: that each man protect his life and limbs as much
as he can
- No Human Law in the purely natural state; only Divine (God’s) Law
- Men live in a constant State of War
● On the Natural Law of Contracts
- First law of nature is that the right to all things must not be held onto
- When one makes a separate agreement contrary to the first, the second is rendered
illegal because the first means he no longer has the right to do or not do
● On the Other Laws of Nature
- The second law of nature: stand by your agreements
- Third: ingratitude
- Fourth: everyone should be considerate
4
a sovereign state whose citizens or subjects are relatively homogeneous in factors such as language or
common descent.
, - Fifth: pity
- Sixth: punishment regards only to the future
- Seventh: against insult
- Eighth: against pride
- Ninth: modesty
- Tenth: fairness, anti-discrimination
- Eleventh: having things in common
- Twelfth: dividing things by lot
- Thirteenth: primogeniture and first occupation
- Fourteenth: immunity for mediators of peace
- Fifteenth: on appointing an arbitrator
- Sixteenth: no one be arbitrator in his own cause
- Seventeenth: arbitrators should have no expectation of reward from the parties to
a judgement
- Eighteenth: on witnesses
- Nineteenth: no agreement be made with an arbitrator
- Twentieth: against drunkenness and things that can impair use of reason
1/29
Epistle dedicatory
● Man are wolves, not God
● Polities act as wolves in order to enact their highest good of self-preservation
- “You think you’re a believer, but you’re actually a wolf whose baring takes the
form of a prayer”
○ Belief → means of predation
○ Independently of what a wolf says, you can trust that they will (and must)
preserve themselves at all costs
a. Because human beings are wolves
- Natural law is that people must preserve themselves (this is hopeful)
● Geometers are the best of the philosophers to understand clear knowledge
- There is certainty
○ Similarly, we can rely on self-preservation
● Violent death vs. death
- Violent death includes an “other” because it is imposed by that “other”
○ Hell is the supreme evil man strives to avoid
○ Challenges principles of religions like Christianity
a. Must kill a tyrant because they are minions of Satan
○ Sects are opposed
○ Each sect will think the others are wrong and therefore going to
hell
, ○ All are ready to die in the name of absolute good in the afterlife
(Heaven)
- However, death itself is unavoidable
○ Life is brutish, nasty, and short
○ The great equalizer
○ Martyrs are cherished because of self-sacrifice
a. They are the sick puppies of wolves
b. Not all are reasonable
● Hobbes creates a language in which people who disagree on the highest things and
nevertheless agree with each other that death is the highest evil
- Science and religion are not the same (but they are married)
- Religion may fuel conflict surrounding the afterlife and why it is better than this
one, but the conflict is not the fault of the religion itself but rather the members
○ Also the afterlife (if not hell) is better
Section 1: Liberty
● Man is not born fit for society
● Why is there theological civil war?
- Logos
○ Infinite war because of dishonesty
○ Disavowing animal nature and wolfish predatory instinct
○ No trust
- Christians vs. Christians
○ In principle, all the same (all believe in the same higher being)
○ Hubris
- Driven by fear, not intellect or love or anything else
○ Logos (morality, intellect) is what gets us killed (and makes us martyrs)
○ Hell on earth (hence why the afterlife is better)
- Natural law vs. natural right
○ Natural law5 says we must preserve life at all costs
○ Natural right6 is the right to have use of any tool as a means to the end of
preserving life
○ Natural law commands you to give up your natural right
a. Guides you the conclusion of what you must do with your natural
right: give it up/transfer it
b. Anything else contradicts natural law and puts our
self-preservation in question
c. One who does not give up their right is an outlaw, wolf, and
criminal
5
must
6
can
Intro to Legal Theory
Professor Sitze
1/27/25
LJST
● Not a Pre-Law major
● The study of law as it relates to the liberal arts (an end not a means)
- Rather than wait for a midlife crisis (Seneca), ask yourself now (teleology1)
● Study of law as a problem of moral reasoning
● Comprehension of tensions of modern jurisprudence
● The crisis of modernity
- The emergence of the reformation (16th century) which challenged the idea of a
universal concept of good (various religious groups)
- Infinite civil war, not infinite civil peace
- Not only freedom but obligation to break the law (civil disobedience)
- Newton
a. Laws of physics (departure from Catholic/Protestant medieval beliefs)
- Slavery created moral complications → led to ideas of racial
superiority/inferiority
- Francis Bacon
a. Knowledge is power (an algorithm) → to control your own nature as a
means to the end of human mastery)
b. “What’s the use?” modern version of a cardinal question of classical
formation
c. As opposed to “what is the point/purpose?” (Socrates)
- Modernity is a set of unstable conditions that give rise to a set of logics that are
shot through with tensions, ambiguities, paradoxes, and contradictions (crying out
for our judgement)
a. Always at some level contradict themselves from within (constitutive
imperfections)
b. We all have the concept of the highest good → because we all agree that
we know that we don’t know what the highest good is (otherwise we are
dogmatists)
c. The tolerant always have to be intolerant of the intolerant2
- Exercise realism, precision, etc.
● Accidents of birth should not determine life chances3
1
explanation of phenomena in terms of the purpose they serve rather than of the cause by which they
arise
2
Jesus with the Pharisees and religious leaders
3
J.S. Mill’s “The Subjection of Women,” 1859.
, - Accidents are not arbitrary but essential (race, gender, sexuality, etc.)
- We are not born equal (despite what the DOI says)
● Separation of Power
- Nation-states4 such as South Africa
- The secularization of power
a. Separation of church and state (1st Amendment) → did not exist for
different religious sects in medieval times
- Printing press → only a law when it is codified
● Gossip = litigation against a paper whose author is not there to defend it (read it as
though the author were here in the room)
- The liberal arts are not about gossip but about confronting your decisions on their
own terms in a robust way
● Frederick Douglass
- The Constitution is tainted and should not be touched by Christians
- The Constitution is beautiful (but still tainted?)
● Laserbeam reading (45 on/15 off)
- Green light: could explain to someone not in the class
- Yellow light: I don’t know
- Red light: I am lost and this makes no sense (Kant)
- Pre-reading
a. Flip through
b. Ask yourself the purpose of what you are reading
c. Get through a couple sections, but really get through them
Hobbes, On the Citizen, Section 1: Liberty
● On the State of Man without Civil Society
- First foundation of natural Right: that each man protect his life and limbs as much
as he can
- No Human Law in the purely natural state; only Divine (God’s) Law
- Men live in a constant State of War
● On the Natural Law of Contracts
- First law of nature is that the right to all things must not be held onto
- When one makes a separate agreement contrary to the first, the second is rendered
illegal because the first means he no longer has the right to do or not do
● On the Other Laws of Nature
- The second law of nature: stand by your agreements
- Third: ingratitude
- Fourth: everyone should be considerate
4
a sovereign state whose citizens or subjects are relatively homogeneous in factors such as language or
common descent.
, - Fifth: pity
- Sixth: punishment regards only to the future
- Seventh: against insult
- Eighth: against pride
- Ninth: modesty
- Tenth: fairness, anti-discrimination
- Eleventh: having things in common
- Twelfth: dividing things by lot
- Thirteenth: primogeniture and first occupation
- Fourteenth: immunity for mediators of peace
- Fifteenth: on appointing an arbitrator
- Sixteenth: no one be arbitrator in his own cause
- Seventeenth: arbitrators should have no expectation of reward from the parties to
a judgement
- Eighteenth: on witnesses
- Nineteenth: no agreement be made with an arbitrator
- Twentieth: against drunkenness and things that can impair use of reason
1/29
Epistle dedicatory
● Man are wolves, not God
● Polities act as wolves in order to enact their highest good of self-preservation
- “You think you’re a believer, but you’re actually a wolf whose baring takes the
form of a prayer”
○ Belief → means of predation
○ Independently of what a wolf says, you can trust that they will (and must)
preserve themselves at all costs
a. Because human beings are wolves
- Natural law is that people must preserve themselves (this is hopeful)
● Geometers are the best of the philosophers to understand clear knowledge
- There is certainty
○ Similarly, we can rely on self-preservation
● Violent death vs. death
- Violent death includes an “other” because it is imposed by that “other”
○ Hell is the supreme evil man strives to avoid
○ Challenges principles of religions like Christianity
a. Must kill a tyrant because they are minions of Satan
○ Sects are opposed
○ Each sect will think the others are wrong and therefore going to
hell
, ○ All are ready to die in the name of absolute good in the afterlife
(Heaven)
- However, death itself is unavoidable
○ Life is brutish, nasty, and short
○ The great equalizer
○ Martyrs are cherished because of self-sacrifice
a. They are the sick puppies of wolves
b. Not all are reasonable
● Hobbes creates a language in which people who disagree on the highest things and
nevertheless agree with each other that death is the highest evil
- Science and religion are not the same (but they are married)
- Religion may fuel conflict surrounding the afterlife and why it is better than this
one, but the conflict is not the fault of the religion itself but rather the members
○ Also the afterlife (if not hell) is better
Section 1: Liberty
● Man is not born fit for society
● Why is there theological civil war?
- Logos
○ Infinite war because of dishonesty
○ Disavowing animal nature and wolfish predatory instinct
○ No trust
- Christians vs. Christians
○ In principle, all the same (all believe in the same higher being)
○ Hubris
- Driven by fear, not intellect or love or anything else
○ Logos (morality, intellect) is what gets us killed (and makes us martyrs)
○ Hell on earth (hence why the afterlife is better)
- Natural law vs. natural right
○ Natural law5 says we must preserve life at all costs
○ Natural right6 is the right to have use of any tool as a means to the end of
preserving life
○ Natural law commands you to give up your natural right
a. Guides you the conclusion of what you must do with your natural
right: give it up/transfer it
b. Anything else contradicts natural law and puts our
self-preservation in question
c. One who does not give up their right is an outlaw, wolf, and
criminal
5
must
6
can
