Since it was first noted “nomos” has sneaked to the West world in order to keep order in the earth. However, its meaning is very unstable. Robert Cover and Carl Schmitt disagree in its employing. If we travel back in time to “polis, we would find out that Socrates wanted to define nomos as a sharing. Thus we could battle the arguments from the Sophists. How could nomos be linked to our modern time and be present in the legal interpretation? In my hunch, nomos has been occulted in the form of law. Law can only exist together with violence, claimed centuries ago the French philosopher Blasé Pascal. So to speak, every form of law, including the constitution, carries normative violence. This paper seeks to explain how the the romantic constitution cannot survive without violence, a violence which is presented in the legal interpretation, which warps the original meaning of nomos as sharing.
We look forward to welcoming you on July 3-5, 2023 for our Annual Conference entitled "Islands and Ocean: Public Law in a Plural World." The conference will take place at the Victoria University of Wellington, in New Zealand.
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