Comments by "harvey young" (@harveyyoung3423) on "Bad Law Project: Help Keep Politics Out of Law & Policing. Laurence Fox, Leader of the Reclaim Party" video.

Part 2/2 In this context we then witness from the 1970s the simultaneous but highly diverse and contextual building up of many bottom up institutions and top down institutions loosely centred around academia to serve this end but from a million points of light. It emerged in US on the ground from Civil rights and then feminism and minority rights. Now its a million books. over here it was incremental from the creation of Jackie Magazine to afternoon women's programs while the men are out at work. this is Derrida Foucault and Deleuze in practice, and they changed and adapted their philosophies as on the ground conditions (successes failures extra political events etc. ) changed. which then had no centre but now is probably centred around the law. What can be done Lenin said? Cleary the supposed ad hominem fallacy is not regarded as a fallacy and perhaps many people approaching this from context of religious law and any legal change would have to hold this view. but of course one can now turn this left argument back onto them, without having to establish a traditional conservative or formal notion of law. just point to the history and agenda ad political and the interconnected trans-institutional networks of real people operating simultaneously in many organisation for the social justice project. it used to be called malfeasance and corruption. but of course it make them vulnerable to the equivalent critic they made of this system 50 years ago. as they have gained in power they have also had to increasingly coordinate what used to be diverse highly contextual activities. i would propose then that you do not have to follow this long arc as if this long arc had not happened, rather a kind of leap frogging (before the water warms to cooking temperature) can happen, the context now is not the same as in the 1970s so sae strategy is not required. rather an analogy is the idea of the third world economic development model where they do not have to pass though the European and US industrial revolution of the 19th century to become industrialised. But the risk is that his amounts to imposing a system that developed slowing in many facets of social and psychological life at home onto a culture and institutions as if the historical process can be just logical imposed as a instituional function on a incongruent other historical base. Advice: look at the concept of "Attainder" and in U.S. "Criminal Bill of Attainder"
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Part 1/2 It might be useful to look at "Ad hominem" in law and philosophy (contested as to relevance and validity e.g the important link, apart form the obvious, is that in a conception of pure law as a pseudo formal law abstracted from persons and even perhaps from institutions reference is made only to the law and not to the people doing it. An absolute sense of ad hominem would not consider the interests associations beliefs and conduct of the people in the law as at all relevant to their application of the law. This of course would make redundant any notion of "those who apply the law should be subject to the law" as it tries to separates the legal functional application from the attitudes and dispositions and body of those in the legal profession and their attendants. This separation requires a formal theory of law as application that is like logical deduction i.e no interpretation or application judgment (no human is necessary and any trained humans can do this regardless of their context they would all agree).It is a belief that law is like logic. the rejection of this was key to the New Left Critical Legal Theory from France to America in 1980s and 1990s and Critical Legal Studies in U.K. from 1980's. But this turn from a logical conception of the application of law has antecedents in early American pragmatism in O.W. Holmes and John Dewey. in UK it is post Wittgenstein on rule following that is somewhat the intellectual context. So in a nut shell the left argue that the law has its origin and application in various interests prejudices and corruptions from the past to he present and this needs to be corrected, and that the legal system and its concept of justice "that cannot not be deconstructed" can also afford a change wrt rights to correct this past injustice and prejudice in the very same legal institutions along with academic and political work using legal cases as the tool via the media. it is now called the "jurisprudential turn in politics" which i guess means the political turn in jurisprudence. of course this appears the legitimate use of the political in law since by their light the law has always been political and for the rich and only liberal ideology (Marx) makes us think it was about justice, it was always about power , and the interests of the rich. Thus the referencing of biased judges and police and other institutions and people and the rejection there of their legitimacy and authority must turn on the idea that there cannot be a person and institution independent notion of the functioning of law. Thus ad hominem is taken as a valid legitimate move.
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