Dooyeweerd consultation - III

Although the consultation proper ended saturday afternoon, it was in effect relocated north to our side of the border, as Alan Cameron, Jonathan Chaplin, Gideon Strauss and I were part of an event yesterday afternoon at Redeemer University College. Here some of my colleagues and a few of our students showed up to hear Cameron deliver a paper, "The Encyclopedia of the Science of Law: A Provisional Assessment of the Legal Philosophy of Herman Dooyeweerd." The subject matter is one of the lesser known elements of Dooyeweerd's philosophy, viz., his legal theory. It is less known primarily because his major, multi-volume work, The Encyclopedia of the Science of Law, is mostly still in Dutch and has not yet been translated into English in its entirety. Only the first volume is available in English, while the crucial third volume has yet to appear.

The principal contribution of Dooyeweerd's mature legal philosophy consists in the recognition of legal plurality, i.e., that law is a feature, not only of sovereign states, but of every human communal formation. For example, by-laws of a private organization, such as a charitable foundation or a labour union, possess a genuine legal character in their own right and are not to be deemed somehow derivative from state law. To be sure, the state may be called upon at some point to enforce the members' conformity to these by-laws as part of its mandate to do public justice, but it is not the state that gives them their validity. Their status as genuine laws precedes any sort of state action. Something similar could be said of a private contract, in which the intention of the two parties to be bound by its terms is distinct from the relationship of the parties to state law.

Cameron's remarks and Chaplin's subsequent response whetted our appetites for the third volume of the Encyclopedia. Let's hope it is published before too long.