S1 Ep 1 - Theories of Law & Conceptions of Justice with Professor Luke Mason

[Music] Welcome everyone to the Law and Society podcast brought to you by the City Law School at City University of Lungan. The City Law School's Law and Society podcast is co-hosted by me, Dr. Sabrina Germain, Senior Lecturer at the City Law School, and me, Dr. Adrian Yong, also Senior Lecturer at the City Law School. Each episode we will be interviewing a guest to speak about their expertise on issues relating to the law, the right stemming from the law, and most importantly, how context matters to all this. We hope you enjoy it. [Music] Hi everyone, thank you for joining us for the City Law School's Law and Society podcast with me, Dr. Sabrina Germain, and me, Dr. Adrian Yong. Welcome to episode one where we will be exploring theories of law and conception of justice with Professor Luke Mason of the University of Westminster. Hi, Luke. Hi, Sabrina. Luke, would you mind introducing yourself for our listeners? Yeah, thanks so much for having me on your podcast. It's a real honour to be here. So yeah, my name is Luke Mason. I'm Professor of Juris Prudence at the University of Westminster, where in my spare time there, I'm also head of the law school, and yeah, it's absolutely brilliant to have this opportunity to share some ideas with your students. Thanks so much for joining us, Luke. We really appreciate it, and we really hope that all of our students learn a lot from your expertise in the areas that we're going to ask you. So we like to start off all of our episode asking our guests a big question. How would you define the concept of law? Okay, so I think it's right to start with this question all times. I think it's really brave to start with such a big question, and I remember when I spent many, many years teaching Juris Prudence to, which is the philosophy of law, to undergrad students, I used to start off by asking them this question in the first session. I used to get them to write down one sentence, and then we'd go around and get everyone to read out this sentence that written, and sometimes it was hundreds of students. And the variety of answers that would come back was always amazing, but it was always the same variety. When you'd each year, you'd get the same six or seven different answers. Some people define law as a kind of structure of power. Some people define law as somehow related to justice and fairness. Some people define law in terms of its connection to an institutional system of rules. Some people defined law in terms of its connection to a profession, so like law as in political profession. Some people defined it in some kind of broader political way, which was maybe more difficult to pin down as a as a family resemblance concept, an idea, which is kind of linked by some core elements. And then people defined it in some other interesting way, somehow connected to injustice, and sometimes connected to the click economics, money, which was always interesting. And I think all of those things are true. Law is all of those things. It's a way of organizing the world. It's a way of understanding the world. It's a way of organizing a profession, and it's a way of interacting with each other. It's all of those things in one go. But I think if I had to define what law is trying to sum up those things and separate the legal elements from the non-legal elements, I think I would say the law is a way of knowing. Law is a way of understanding things. That is different to other ways of understanding the world or ourselves. So if we compare law to its close cousins in terms of things we study, economics, sociology, politics, language, I think what makes law different to those things is a different way of understanding. It's understanding through the use of rules, through the use of obligations, through the use of certain values and principles. And those are things we encounter in lots of other areas of the world. So we encounter rules when we're interacting with each other, even in this podcast we're not interrupting each other. There are some kind of rules, even though we didn't lay down the law beforehand. We know that those exist. But law is a very specific way of understanding the world using those things, which we already have our disposal. So it's a way of understanding the world in what we might call an "anormative mode." So rather than understanding how people interact with each other, we understand how people should interact with each other or we look at how they maybe understand their own obligations, their own visions of what should happen. And that's a very specific thing to law. So I think if there's something that really unifies all of our different visions of law, all of which are, I think, are equally valid, it's that specific mode of knowing, which is, I think it's quite an emancipatory thing when we're talking about it through students. It can be quite empowering because what you realize when you understand that law is about a way of knowing is that all students of law have this way of knowing, that they can understand the world in a way that non-law students can't understand. So although law students might have learned a lot of laws, that's really just part of the training to know other things, to understand the world in a very specific way, to understand how it's organised in a very human way. So we couldn't have law in the context of robots or maybe other animals who don't understand in that rule-based way. We only have it through this kind of human vision, and that law students and lawyers, more generally, are experts in using that kind of knowledge. So yeah, coming back, I guess to the question, how would I define the concept of law? I would describe it as a very specific kind of knowledge, a normative form of knowledge. One thing I would say is that's not necessarily a standard answer, it's not an answer you'll find in making books, but I think it's a way of bringing together all of the competing visions of law, which exist, which seem to be absolutely odds with each other, seem to not sit right with each other at all. If we can all see them as different variants of ways of understanding this kind of normativity, rule-based vision, I think it makes sense of them. So that's how I would define it. I'm sure you'll get lots of other interesting answers to that question as well, probably one can get that one again. I mean, I've definitely heard a lot of students and lots of people say, it's about power structures, all of the things that you mentioned. So that's definitely valid, but I think that what you've said is also really, really interesting and it's different, but really salient way to kind of think about it. I wonder if we could maybe then ask you what your opinion is on the relationship between law and the rule of law? Absolutely. Yeah, I think this is a really interesting question. So law is a political idea, right? Law. So is a political idea? It has a kind of ideological content, of course. At certain times, just as you said before, Edren, when we're talking about law with students, I often talk about power and things, and that makes law a political thing, but law doesn't have to be a political thing. Law, as I said before, can be a way of knowing in all kinds of different contexts, although with political ramifications. It doesn't have to be a political thing. On the other hand, the rule of law is a political idea. The rule of law is a political ideology about how we should organize a constitutional state. So the rule of law is, I think, part of an overlapping, not entirely coherent, series of values, which dominates liberal constitutional thinking in the West, which overlaps somewhat with constitutionalism, with democracy, with representative bodies, with some other institutions, and the rule of law is about, I would say, two things. It's a way in which legislation operates, that operates through general principles, which are knowable by people, and it also kind of connotes the idea that people who are working within the, or under the auspices of the state are equally subject to those general rules. So the rule of law is kind of an overarching, political ideology about how we should best govern our society. In a way, it's not entirely linked to law itself, but there is a link, of course, because rules and law are linked. And law is a much broader idea to the rule of law. We could talk about the rule of law maybe for one week within constitutional theory, and that would probably be enough for most law students and for most lawyers. I don't think we ever have enough time to talk about the nature of law generally. Law is a massive thing. Law is an incredibly exciting thing, an area of debate and question. The rule of law can, of course, be questioned, but this is a small ideological component of a large number of values which govern up political discourse. I think what is interesting and where they do overlap is that law and the rule of law are both used as kind of loaded concepts. That people will say, "Oh, this is against the rule of law, this is in the interest of the rule of law." Whereas what they really want to say is this is something I think is right. And it's used as a way, just as we say things of democratic or fan, things is used as a way of somehow bolstering an argument without any additional information. And I think law is also used in that way, but it's used in a slightly different way because you need to give more information when you're talking about legality law, but when you simply talk about the rule of law, I think it's a much more, I think it's a much less subtle concept of the rule of law. And again, I think that's probably the opposite answer to that which most people would give, whether it's able lawyers, you know, it's just a question of legality, whereas the rule of law is a much more complex political question with lots of nuance. Of course, I think law is a broader thing. And I don't think it's any coincidence that probably in our conversation now we'll go on to talk much more about law rather than the rule of law. Because the question on the rule of law, yeah, it's interesting, but do we really want to revisit our constitutional law seminars from our first year of our law degree every week? Probably not. No, definitely not. This is not a not not that forum for it, but I think that that's a really interesting way of thinking about it. And I was definitely thinking, what do you really mean by that? But no, that's exactly, you know, it's exactly what you said. It's very clear. It's totally different. I think that's really interesting. Thanks. Yeah, interesting and controversial look. And so we know that law does not exist in a vacuum. And often we support, we see it support the social order or even as a tool to regulate or reduce inequalities. But how should we understand the relationship that law has with other academic disciplines, disciplines according to you? Yeah, and this is a really interesting question. So I think in a way it links back to the question that you asked at the very beginning, or at least my sketch of an answer to it, where I said law is a very specific way of knowing the world. And and I think what we sometimes miss when we study law as students is that when we study contract law or taught law or anything and any any doctrinal area of law, so we might call it, especially the area of law, is we're really studying that thing just from the perspective of someone who can use a rule based perspective on that thing. So we're studying when we study contracts, for example, we're studying a rule based analysis of exchanges and promises. That's not the only way we could understand the process of contracting and exchanging. But there are literally thousands of ways we could understand it. So I think everyone would accept that as true, right? It's not simply through understanding contract law that we understand how we choose what record player we buy to be kind of trendy hipsters listening to vinyl, whatever it is. That contract law can't explain that thing, but it can explain some of the reasons we rely on the tool of contract to achieve that outcome. But so this kind of leading into an answer to the question is if we want to understand things, these phenomena which law purports to help us understand, we have no chance unless we also embrace the idea that other perspective, other modes of knowing give us an insight into these things. That for example, if we wanted to understand the buying of high-five equipment, I don't know why I chose that example. We would also probably want to look at culture related to music and consumption of music and the meaning of music and its relationship with standard contractual forms and whether we think those things are captured properly and copyrights and all kinds of other things, some of which are legal and some of which are definitely not legal. But none of those things on their own would give us a really insight into those things. And once we understand that law only operates within this kind of web of different ways of knowing in different ways of acting, we can use a kind of a selection of those different perspectives to better understand law, the process is governed by law and those other perspectives themselves. So we could use legal perspectives to help us better understand, for example, the consumption of music, but we can also understand sociological perspectives on the consumption of music to help us better understand the operation of, for example, contractual. I think this is when you explain it in that way, it becomes a non-controversial perspective. I think one thing that Lawy has rightly worried about sometimes is that when we look at things from a non-legal perspective, it can kind of crowd out law because it's very ephemeral. It almost looks like it's almost not there, right? It's a non-tangible thing, it's just a perspective, it's a way of nuances or understanding of something which is going on outside of legal exchanges to some extent. And I think it's right that Lawy is worried about that, but the way to respond to that is not to exclude other academic disciplines. It's precisely to say that the value that Law brings is through the perspective that it allows you to have on these phenomena, and that when you combine those perspectives with other things, it gives you a whole new range of viewpoints and levels of understanding. And of course, what that allows you to do then is to take non-legal perspectives on legal truisms, so that from a legal perspective within a particular contract system, for example, there are certain things which are, by definition, true, right? The contracting parties have legal personhood, and the certain people can make contracts in certain people, cons and so on and so forth, there are certain consequences of breaches of contract, there are certain things which define breaches themselves. But in order to think in a legal way through those rules, you have to almost embrace them. You can disagree with them, but you have to embrace them to think through them. Allowing yourself the distance to look at them from an economic perspective or a sociological perspective or even a literary perspective is a story about Law, for example, allows you to step outside of that legal viewpoint while still taking on more of the idea that you have some special insight as a legally trained person. I think one of the really interesting things about this question is it's not very common for non-lawyers to embrace the critical perspectives that lawyers bring. They will often want lawyers to come in and give them a very doctrinal perspective on things, but of course, we know that there are non- doctrinal visions of law, we can understand law from critical perspectives using our legal methods, so using how things should be or how things might be, and just trying to think, well, what is it that legal perspectives bring, what is it that non-legal perspectives bring and how we can combine those? Well, it opens up the world towards us lawyers and opens up the world to non-lawyers in lots of interesting and creative ways. This brings me right back. I'm going to finish this answer at some point. This brings me back to something you said before, Adrian, about my answer to the first question, when you said that students will often talk about law in relation to power. One of the reasons I will often resist that is it's quite interesting because it's a perspective which doesn't give any power to us thinkers using the law, so to students. For example, students think if they think of laws related to power, they don't think of themselves as having any power, whereas using the knowledge that law gives you, you have infinite perspectives on the world, and I think opening that up to more perspectives, more perspectives than that, even from other disciplines, enhances that power even more, because when you understand things through law, combined with other perspectives, you have new viewpoints on things, and the way law works is if you can imagine it in a different way, you can recast the law, you can reinvent the law, reinterpret the law, and that's the power that we all have students, academics, practicing lawyers, judges, legislators. Because law is a way of knowing, we can re-know the world in new creative ways, and the more creative we can get using different disciplines, the greater potential we have, I think, as lawyers, as creative thinkers. I think you've hit the nail on the head there, Luke. I think that a lot of people who probably don't have a background in law consider that law is actually something that's maybe quite boring, certainly that's the way that doctrinal law or black letter law is perceived by the outside world, and lawyers are often considered as people who are quite inaccessible or quite difficult to understand, and this idea plagues law a little bit. But in my opinion, this is perhaps a little bit of a misconception, considering that actually what makes law all the more accessible and interesting is when you put it in context, and that's what this whole podcast is about. Yeah, I think that's a really interesting perspective on that, about the unknowable nature of law and people from outside of the law missing that, and missing the essence of law, rather. I think one thing that's really interesting, goes back to the second question actually, is the people think of the legal study and legal knowledge and legal practice, are somehow having to be identical to our idealised vision of the law itself, which is about rules which are knowable, but of course we know that law when you study law or no law or practice law, it thinks that opposite of that, it's playing with the law, it's playing with that certainty, it's reinventing that certainty, and that's what we have, we all the listeners to this podcast as well, as legal thinkers we have that we can bring that creativity to the game, I guess, and table. What I found also interesting in what you just said is that you see some sort of, if I put unfortunately negative spin, is that we have some limitations as lawyers, there's some boundaries to our discipline, and in order for us to go beyond that, we kind of need to reach out to other disciplines and to enter to partnerships so to speak, so I don't know if you could unpack a little bit what we mean as researchers or as legal scholars about socio-legal studies, what does that mean exactly? Yeah sure, so I think it's a really opposite question really following the previous one, because we talk about lots of different perspectives, but a real dominant trend within the last 50 or 60 years within legal floor has been the socio-legal movement, which is to think there is particular value in combining legal perspectives with those which come from either social theory or sociological method, and there's no one single answer to the question of what socio-legal studies or socio-legal theory, but I think they're a group of different movements which are kind of overlapping, all of which have a lot of value and bring a lot to the table in terms of knowledge, although they do challenge some of our beliefs about legal knowledge and about the law itself, and that's what makes them valuable, and it might sometimes be when we have to decide whether we agree or we don't agree with the outcomes, and that's fun as well of course. So I would say broadly what the socio-legal movement is about is to say the pure legal method, that kind of knowing through rules that I talked about before, however creative and infinite it is, as you say, it's not going to give you everything because it's limited in the types of knowledge it can give you, and in particular what that kind of knowledge can't bring is I guess empirical certainty, right? It can tell us about how the world should be or might be or could be reimagined or should have been or anything like that, can tell us all of those things in idealized ways or imagined ways, but it can't tell us how the world is or was. We have methods for knowing that we have different ways of understanding the world, and I guess that's probably going to generally, this is a slightly controversial thing to say, but I think it's right, into two different types of knowing. One is about social theory generally, right? So ways of understanding how the human world works, not to how it should work, which is what lawyers do, but how it does work, right? How humans interact with each other, and some social theory, some very dominant social theory of favour and do it count for example, does also try and engage with laws and rules, but generally it's not so interested in that. It's interested in how humans understand their own action or act in conjunction with each other even without understanding their action. So one branch of social legal theory really tries to embrace that part of our understanding of the world and says how can we understand legal systems and societies governed by legal systems in a way which goes beyond our simple understanding of the content of the laws? I think that's one trend. I think actually the more important trend, and it's the one we usually are hinting at when we're talking about social legal studies, is something more what we might call methodological. It's a way of understanding or a way of investigating law using the methods of sociology. So broadly, the sociological parts of social sciences use methods which we would more usually associate with natural sciences, physics and chemistry, biology, where we look at things, we watch them, we observe them, we try and explain what we observe. And from that we draw some conclusions, it's what we're calling empirical study. Lawyers and legal knowing are not well suited to that kind of knowledge or investigation when they only use legal methods. Sociological methods give us an insight into those things. If we want to ask therefore what is the effect of a particular law? What is the impact of a particular law? We can't use legal methods alone. I would say it would be a very vain lawyer indeed who doesn't care about the effect of laws. The only thing they care about is how they imagine the laws to work. I talked for a long time before about how amazing it is that we can reimagine the world as lawyers. But if that's all we want to do, the only thing we want to do is to reimagine the world. We're living in dream world. We also want to know whether it works, whether it happens, whether the impact that we expect it does happen, whether the way people use those laws is what we anticipate it. Legal methods are not going to tell us those things, right? So the judgment in a case is not going to tell us that, for example, using legal methods or a monograph written by a brilliant legal scholar is not going to tell us that thing if they only use legal methods. What's going to tell us that is the use of sociological method. Using observation of specific things, and that can be done in lots of different ways using data, using interviews, using other kinds of ways of building metrics and data sets using certain kinds of economics, parts of economics which use sociological method. For example, economics is a branch of sociology after all. That's also a controversial thing to say. So we say that's broadly where social legal theory of sociological studies fits into what. And I think it's very important for us to understand it as not the same as legal study. Even if we take a very broad vision of what legal study is and we take a quite an expansive vision, I don't think legal study alone encapsulates or captures sociological study. We have to think of it as something that's been combined with a different mode of knowledge. Now, there are some people, I think, going back over the last 110, 120 years maybe, who think really not all legal knowledge is somehow sociological. And so it's going to go back to the early legal. Realist movement and other things like this where you say, no, we just have to look at what outcomes and things are and that's how we understand law. I think that's completely wrong. That's completely wrong. And that collapses sociological and legal. And that they are actually two different ways of knowing the world. And if we reject one and just and say, no, we're going to keep one of them, whether that's the legal perspective or the social legal perspective, we're never going to embrace a true attempt to understand the law and this impact. So that's how I define social legal studies. That's very interesting to me. You point a lot at sociology in a broad term, but just to clarify for our listeners, I think it's important to understand that we talk about social sciences and law, right? When we talk about sociological studies, so we're not limiting ourselves to sociology or economics, but also history or anthropology, for example, for an ethnographic understanding of certain rules, et cetera. I understand what you're saying when you say, collapsing one and the other would be kind of working to a disadvantage in terms of our intellectual enterprise. But in a way, isn't sociological study simply answering a very complex questions? Because we have very complex issues in modern or all types of societies. And therefore, we need other tools than just the black letter law. And we need this sociological approach, like you said, the methods to understand very complex questions and complex context. I think it's a really interesting question. I don't think social legals, so yeah, I could be the agree, but I think there's a limit to what we can do with it. So we definitely need it, whether or not our society is complex. But I think the danger of collapsing discipline still exists there, even if we embrace the idea that we need it. Because it can't tell us everything. It can't, for example, tell us what the correct doctrinal approach to consideration and contractories. For example, it can't tell us that. Those are moral legal questions. They are not purely social legal questions. And if we collapse everything into social legal, we actually end up hiding the moral questions behind the analytical approaches of ethnographic, sociological, anthropological, and all the other approaches that you've talked about that have developed over the last 150 years or so. Those areas suggest that we can, if you take them on their own, if we were to embrace those as the way to answer complex legal questions and those alone, we would be marginalising the normative questions which lawyers are actually trained to answer best. Whether lawyers know that they're trained to answer those questions best. There's another question, of course. But I think recognising the ability of social legal perspectives to provide critical analysis, more sophisticated analysis allows us to expand our perspectives on law. I don't think it allows us to better understand existing questions, it allows us to understand more questions than the answers to those questions. That would be my viewpoint. But there are lots of legal theorists who I think would argue in a more or less low-key way that something along the line of what you've suggested that to bring. I think there are a lot of people who would say, "No, no, no, really ultimately what we want to understand complexity, we need a social legal perspective." I think I would push back quite strongly on that. I think there are certain elements of legal knowledge which are inherently legal and that they do overlap with other disciplines, but they overlap more with the political theory, moral philosophy, and ethics. And I don't think social, sociological perspectives, understood in the broad sense, will ever help us directly answer those questions. They will tell us the outcome and impact of those things, which we need to feed into the answering of our questions. I think in the end, human endeavors like law require us to take responsibility for our own decisions, as moral decisions, and delegating an answer to complex questions to social legal analysis is a dereliction of our duty collectively to say, "This is what we believe in and this is what we think the law should be." And although we want to be informed by social legal analysis, we can't, we can't just pass the book to social legal analysis. Thanks, Luke. I think that's really interesting and it also leads us on really nicely to our next question. I mean, we've talked so much about law not being in a vacuum and connecting it with other disciplines. So I wondered if we could ask you, if you believe that interdisciplinarity, which has become rather something really important and very, very prominent in legal studies over the last couple of years, and that is law coupled with any other disciplines, do you think that interdisciplinarity necessarily leads to a more critical study of the law? And perhaps why or why not? I mean, you might have touched a little bit on this, but maybe you could draw that out a little bit more because I think that, you know, like I say, when you first start studying law, you are taught all the black letter stuff and it kind of feels like you don't have very much capacity to connect to with anything else. And I suppose this is what we're kind of thinking about today as to whether connecting it and, you know, putting it in a bit more of a context actually helps us be more critical in our study of the law. Yeah, I think it's a brilliant question. So yeah, I mean, I have a very simple answer to the question whether it whether interdisciplinarity makes us more critical as lawyers. Yes, absolutely. It provides us with an Archimedean standpoint. It provides us with a standpoint outside of our established truths which develop within our legal perspectives. And one thing about, I mean, who's a needlessly long word, but it's made it in a moment, one thing about epistemology, one thing about our ways of knowing, our theories of knowing, is that they become dogmatic. However much we think of ourselves as capable of thinking freely. As soon as we think in a certain mode, we become to some extent a slave so that we're thinking. However, free thinking we think we are. What providing an alternative perspective does as well as allowing us to add so much more complex questions as Sabrina says, is it also allows us to look from outside? So if we wanted to say, well, do we think, going back to my example before, do we think the war on consideration is right within English contract law? Taking a legal perspective alone, it becomes very difficult, it becomes self-referential. You said, well, you know, we have these different theories of contract, relational theory, the will of these things, yeah, we can make sense of consideration in ways there using those kind of legal theories of it. But what if we found out, for example, that loads of people who are engaging in commercial contracts on an ongoing basis will come up with arrangements and don't give any consideration? For example, why if we can study that and look at building contracts, for example, that's not coincidence, I've chosen that example, because it's true, there are lots of contractual variations which don't have consideration. And we find out that actually maybe a large percentage of those contracts have no consideration given for variations. That has to influence our perspective. We've just been given some empirical data using our new perspective or social legal perspective and been given something which will at least allow us to say, well, these are contractual arrangements, they are subject to contract law, people think of themselves as subject to contract law, yeah, they're not actually adhering to all of the tenets of one of the fundamental doctrines of contract. That at least gives us a perspective on where we think we should be going with those kinds of viewpoints. And that's a very simple version in a way, we don't get morally heads up about the question of commercial contracts within the building trade, which is why I chose it as an example. We could choose much more emotive ones as well. And what it would allow us to do then taking these different perspectives is it allows us to give an informed vision of that critical perspective that we all want. So we often ask our students to be critical, right? Students look at us quite rightly, I think, we're mad, so we mean to be critical. Taking all of these different ideas and trying to make sense of it, and then you're telling me to do something completely different. And that will now be critical. Is that, well, what non-legal perspectives combined with legal perspectives allow us to do is to give that criticality from an informed viewpoint. It helps us understand the law better, it helps us understand where the law should be going, and it helps us convert those perspectives into legal viewpoints as well. I might flip the question around slightly and say, it also makes us better doctrinal lawyers. So it does make us more critical, but in fact, law is an open form of knowledge, right? If you look at how judges reason in high level judgments, in appellate judgments, in different legal systems, they will often draw upon non-legal rhetoric, much more than law students are brave enough to do. And these are judges, the best lawyers, right, apparently, allegedly, right, that they will draw on all these different perspectives to justify a legal outcome, because they will draw upon their slightly non-legal perspectives. So I'll give you, for example, the current legal analysis, which is usually used is slightly wrong, or it could be revisited, or that it's correct, right? And that you can kind of combine that critical perspective from outside as well, with your legal viewpoints to give you a better doctrinal analysis as well. So it says there's something about law. This is definitely not me saying this, I'm borrowing this line of someone else, which is epistomically open, right? It's open to new ways of knowledge, right? But we can't get those from within law itself. We have to get them from outside, we have to get them from interdisciplinary perspectives. But unlike a lot of other disciplines, law is open to that. You know, if you make an argument and combine it with some legal sources, and you make an argument that the law should be slightly differently interpreted because of something else, because of some data you have, that makes sense to us as lawyers. We don't tell what, you know, that doesn't understand what that means. Whereas if you said to a mathematician, well, you know, that's some makes sense, but I've also got this other data from this other thing, I want to re-implement you with it. So that's a relevant to me. That doesn't fit in my equation. But law does have that open. It's not just a form of geometry that fits together without any outside influence. So I think it absolutely gives us a more critical perspective on law, but it also gives us a better doctrinal understanding of law. And I think in a way that helps us understand that being critical is not necessarily not being a lawyer or looking at from outside or doing something else. It's using the tools of other perspectives to be a better way. So then on that note of this idea of, you know, being critical and thinking critically and critically evaluating questions in the law, how would you explain what has become somewhat of a, you know, quite popular movement in legal studies that scholars have labeled critical legal theory or, you know, critical legal studies? What do you kind of understand by that? Yeah, it's an interesting question. So it's a little bit like the social legal studies question we had before, and it's probably named slightly less often than social legal studies, but almost as often. It's one of the dominant trends within legal thoughts, in particular in universities over the last 50 years or so. So broadly, what critical legal theory does is to, is to really embrace the idea that there are certain things within legal knowledge in the way we've described it here that are taken for granted. And to have a certain perspective on law, a certain critical perspective on law is we have to deconstruct those things. So that rather than taking for granted that, for example, we have a constitution and we have persons who can make private law arrangements within the law or that we have certain institutions like marriage or employment contracts or these major institutions of the employment of the legal system. Rather than saying these are the tools which we work with, there's kind of creative lawyers, we say, no, let's ask ourselves where these things come from, what these things mean, what hidden power dynamics exist within them. So when we say that some people have legal person, some people don't have legal person in certain contexts. Why is that? Where does that come from? What power does that reflect? In a way what critical legal theory does is to kind of collapse the difference between legal perspectives and political perspectives. And so it's all legal questions and political questions. These are all questions. It takes us back to the idea of law as power and politics that we said that some students will embrace very readily. And otherwise it before that law is a form of knowledge. I think the critical legal theory movement has done something really valuable because it forces us to take one step back from that kind of knowledge. So what other things you're taking for granted in that knowledge? You know, it's all very well saying, well, it's this knowledge we can play with and we can do creative things with, but you're still using the tools that law gives you. So well, rather than using that to think critically about how we could change those things in a small way, let's think in a big way. And then we'll what, you know, why should we have an legal system which is regulated by a constitutional form of certain types? Why should we think of the rule of law as part of that? Where do those ideas come from? What does that reflect? What deeper power dynamics does it reflect? And the reason it does that is kind of a history of ideas ideas. It really embraces critical theory movements from outside of the law which preceded the critical legal theory movement of the previous 10 or 20 years. In particular post-structuralist and post-modernist movements which really tried to deconstruct our knowledge rather than to say, you know, there's kind of a logical form of the world or there's more of an instinctive form of understanding the world. Those are kind of the pre-modern and the modern ways of knowing the world. We said, no, no, let's deconstruct all of it. Let's try and work out what kinds of knowledge and power we're hiding behind the concepts we use to understand the world. And critical legal theory in a way is just as a legal version of that. And because law is inherently made of different concepts that we use to build our legal knowledge, it's particularly well suited to that form of deconstruction. Because we can go back to the very tenets of our legal education, the first things we learn in the first few weeks when we were being indoctrinated without realizing it, saying, what did these ideas come from? Who's interest is this in? It doesn't necessarily mean we get universally valid knowledge through critical legal theory, but it means we at least question some of the perspectives that we're handed. In critical legal theory, it doesn't really give you any outcomes. It gives you a set of perspectives and a set of tools to maybe take a further step back. I wouldn't say it has the user-friendly nature of social legal perspectives or kind of anthropological or ethnographic perspectives that's been talking about before, which really give us a method for knowing things that gives us results, but it gives us more of a mold or a mood of knowing the law of kind of somehow questioning the law and its legitimacy. And the concepts, which are embodied within the law and their legitimacy as well. I sometimes take issue with critical legal studies because it has a very conservative perspective of the law. It assumes that the law is inherently kind of reflecting power structures and that people use the law are idiots and that there's no way of them reinventing the law from themselves. And I've become obvious, I don't think I was thinking the truth. I think law is quite a emancipatory way of knowing things. And I think to some extent critical legal theory is quite simplistic and conservative in its vision of the law. It shares a lot with kind of reactionary conservative political philosophy in my view, which is a controversial thing to say, but I would say that wholeheartedly. But nonetheless, it can feel very empowering to say, let's step back behind the law. What it assumes, of course, if you can't do those things from within the law. And I think maybe we overstate that. And I think a combination of sometimes taking this outside a critical legal perspective and sometimes taking this kind of normative knowledge perspective is always good. A kind of reflective equilibrium between the two approaches is probably a healthy one for everyone to take. But everyone should definitely embrace critical legal studies to some extent. I think it makes you a better human being. But not too much because it makes you a nihilist. So often when talking about law, norms and the justice system, many people will believe that law and justice are really essentially synonyms. But would you think that that is actually correct? Yeah, it's interesting on that, isn't it? Like whether law and justice are synonyms. So I mean, obviously we don't mean synonyms from a perspective of how the words are used because we know that can't be true because people will often talk about the whole being unfair and things. So we know that they can't be literally synonyms. But in a kind of more metaphorical sense, they're often used as synonymous, right? Especially when you talk amongst lawyers, you know, we talk about just outcomes and then we start talking about ethics and law and things. And we often like, lealtons are using them in similar ways. And in particular, given what I said before, about law is a way of knowing the world through normative lens, it does seem that law and justice must be linked in some kind of important way. If law is a way of knowing the world through using moral concepts and ideas of should and obligation and ought, law and justice hopefully must be linked in some structural kind of way. They at least use the same kinds of tools. And I think that's the way in which they are synonymous, right? So that law uses the concepts and techniques which are used also when we talk about things which are fair and unfair. So when we say you should do this, you must do this, it's your obligation and so on. We could be talking about justice or we could be talking about law. But we know that we have different kinds of shoulds and oughts and musts. We have legal ones and we have moral ones. And we hopefully overlap sometimes. But in order for us to use them in different ways, they must be different. They must be different things. So we talk about justice through the law. So we talk about has that been a process which we could describe as just and we often mean has the legal process itself been followed. But that doesn't tell us anything about whether it's actually fair. And especially doesn't tell us anything about whether the law itself is fair. Although we could use the language of should and ought and must and obligation to describe the content of the law, we might say that the law is nonetheless completely unfair. And I think where there is more of an overlap than lots of people would like to recognize is that in modern legal systems, there are pervasive principles which I think are difficult to distance from justice. So we have fundamental principles of equal treatment and natural justice and all kinds of grounds of things like judicial review and the general principles of law which if use lots of different legal systems and constitutional values, but you may depending on your perspective also then include things like constitutional rights within that and they trickle down into the legal system. And we would say that they find their way through legal reasoning into lots of laws at least hopefully. And therefore if legal systems are inherently infused with some of these general perspectives of justice, there must at least in modern constitutional legal systems be some kind of aspirational link between law and justice. But that doesn't get really round the basic problem that they're not the same thing, right? Law and justice are not the same thing because I've had to build this very big cathedral of an answer to say why in a modern legal system in some ways justice does find its way into the law. If I have to make all of those kind of efforts to make that clear link, it means that they can't be the same thing. But they share a language, they share aspirations, they share some parts of our kind of ideological and political thinking as well and we talk about law and justice at the same time. So they're all part of similar aspirations. But there are lots of people who for example will have strong beliefs about justice but very positive beliefs about justice but very pessimistic beliefs about law, for example I think it's a tool to oppress people or something. And vice versa as well there are some people who believe very deeply in the processes of law but you know would be quite skeptical if you said well you know what is justice or justice is nothing. But the law exists. So there are different perspectives on this I think and something maybe we'll explore now. Yes, yes. Well that drives me to my next question. So they are similar. They share commonalities but they are different. I think it's pretty clear from what you're saying. What distinctions would you draw between them? And following up on that, what are the various forms of justice? If there are various forms, if you could explain that. Yeah sure. So what distinctions are the between law and justice? I guess justice is an ideal. Justice is an ideal. It's a way we have at the back of our mind when we react to something and we say for example it's unfair or unjust or an ethical, we're relying on some kind of assumed conception of an ideal world. Even just in a very specific context where a child takes another child's ice cream is that that's unfair. We have an idea that somehow we have some kind of ideal not fully articulated. There's a world which is more just than that. Law shares to some extent that it's kind of ideological and idealized visions. But it's in a very different way. It's within an institutional framework. We have a framework which exists. Law exists within what we call municipal or institutionalized system. It uses its own legal concepts which already exist there. But although we might hope that those achieve visions of justice and we might use arguments from the perspective of justice to interpret the law, we can see that law is much more self-contained. It might be located within a particular community or a particular history or a particular geographical area or a particular discipline or a particular area or a human exchange or a particular kind of religious belief or something like that. The law exists within those kind of more located areas. Justice is a more lofty idealized thing. I think that's the main distinction. Justice is the idea that something we are aspiring to and that we can compare things to law is a more located thing which might aspire towards justice but might also not achieve it. Justice in it is in itself is justice. It is an idealized vision. Law can achieve or not achieve justice. I would say that. Law is a thing in the real world which has some kind of aspirational components. Justice is a thing in the imagined world. So you asked a separate part of the question which is what different forms of justice which exist. So I think primarily when we're looking at this from not from a legal perspective but from the perspective of a legally trained audience, I think the most important initial distinction to draw is that between kinds of justice which lawyers usually think of and then maybe other lofty forms of justice. So justice in the legal context is usually about procedural justice, right? It's the following of legal process, the application of legal rules, the use of those rules to come to the right outcome using those principles and that's that's absolutely fine but it's of course contingent on those located legal institutions that we were talking about before. On the other hand within this distinction there is there is everything else going on with justice. There is what we would call political philosophy. It's theories of justice. There are visions of the world as a just place or as an unjust place and this is what political philosophers do. This is political philosophers trying to imagine and explain why certain kinds of society are fairer than other kinds of society. This is something that's been, since we've been invented, we as human beings invented written language, we've been recording conversations and thoughts about justice. So I won't go into what famous Greek political philosophy said about justice but they give very similar accounts of what justice is to us. So if they say to everyone be getting what they deserve, for instance, is a very common term phrase which goes back to some Greek theorists and I would say we would still use that kind of analysis of what justice is. So what justice is outside of the procedural vision of justice for lawyers is what we might call substantive justice, distributive justice, right? Who gets what? Who gets what in society in a community or in the world? We can look at these at different levels of abstraction. We can see how we distribute the time that we speak in this conversation who gets most time or who gets all of the crisps which are in the cupboard in the house or who gets all of the wealth which is generated in society, who gets the opportunities to share in that wealth, which people from which parts of the world get the opportunities to get that and so on and so forth. You can do at different levels of abstraction. All of those kinds of justice are, you know, why we call distributive justice questions. And they're in a way much more exciting versions of justice. And maybe, yeah, maybe we'll come on to talk about those now. Yes, because these are the type of conceptions of justice. I'm very much interested in, personally, as you know, Luke and Adrian, more on that in the next episode. But let's talk about different conceptions. If you can amuse us a little bit and tell us about different conceptions of distributive justice, just to give us a kind of a taste of what's to come next, Luke takes. Yeah, number of. So I won't go too much into too much depth. But I think one way of thinking about it for purposes of this conversation is we talk a lot about political ideology, right? So there are lots of things with withisms in, you know, liberalism, libertarianism, communism, socialism, fascism and other things. Most of those are reflections of theories of justice. They have a particular account of how society should be organized in terms of how human beings should be organized, who gets what and on what basis. Those are theories of justice, right? So we would have some modern dominant modern theories of justice are going to be egalitarian liberalism, for example, which is that everyone gets an equal opportunity regardless of traits which they are not able to control because they are beyond their control. So it's not fair that they should impact upon their life chances, but those same egalitarian conceptions of liberalism generally tend to argue that it's okay if you end up getting more or less than other people as long as everyone benefits from the whole outcome. For example, it's a very famous theory of justice by John Rawls, probably the most influential political theorist of the last 60 years, 70 years, at least in the English speaking world. That's just a random example. What the reason I use it is because it's quite simple one to understand what theory of justice is. It gives an account of why our society is fair or unfair, how it might become fairer or less fair, using some reasoned principles and gives an explanation of why that society would be more or less fair. So for example, Marxist theories of justice, for example, are based on a basic moral argument that when you work, you generate the value through your labour and therefore anyone who profits from your labour who didn't put in that labour is alienating your profit from the labour and taking it away from your unfairly. And that drives a whole communist and social democratic tradition of theories of justice for the last 150 years, for example, comes from a very specific moral argument. So what makes a theory of justice is a moral argument that's based. And how do they translate into law and what relationship do they have with law? Most constitutional orders, or as we might call them legal systems, will rest inherently on the combination of different theories of justice. So for example, the modern trend of constitutional democracy rests at least in part on the idea that each member of society or at least the citizens within that society have certain inherent values, connected to certain units of value, which means that we should protect their value by attributing to them certain rights. They might be kind of not interference rights, so people can't stop you from expressing yourself or having certain political beliefs or whatever it is, or they might be certain substantive rights, so that you have a right to access certain things, certain goods, which allow you to live at least a basic level of life, which reflects your essence, so maybe to education or health. And then there will be maybe more ambitious versions of that, which go beyond liberal constitutionalism, which would try and be more egalitarian in the way they spread the basic goods of society, so giving them more ambitious access to things like education and material wealth and stuff. And they will be based on a different vision of what justice is. So what is justice? Justice is a vision of how we organize society based on moral arguments, I would say. Now, how are they translating to law? Well, all law by definition is a translation of a theory of justice. Every single legal iteration is inherently the translation of someone's vision of what is fake. Even if it's just come about by somehow drifting into a certain outcome through started diseases, even if it's through them, somehow embodied within the outcome is a vision of fairness. And we said before, or I said at least, that law is a way of knowing things through rules, but all rules, at least rules which involve important things between human beings, not rules of sporting things, rules involving actually real things in the world, that they involved decisions about who gets what, and they are therefore visions of a morality and therefore of justice. Right? So how do they translate into law all the time? Right? So this has an important consequence for anyone who's interested in law. It's when you understand the law, you understand justice, and when you understand justice, you understand law, or you understand what law could be. So if you have a particular perspective on what is fair, you can also reverse engineer from that what you think the law should be, and vice versa. So theories of justice are often seen as quite distant from law, right? And often even, let's be completely honest, if we're talking to some of our colleagues, or students are talking to some of our colleagues and they talk about, oh, when you know this, and I don't think this is fair, and our colleagues might, you know, have good intentions, they might say, well, don't worry too much about that. Just focus on what the law says. I think this is really damaging towards those legal thinkers, because what we're really getting an insight into is what the law is codifying, what moral principles the law is codifying there. It's not coincident, the law are certain for, it's a translation of a particular vision of fairness. And I said before that I don't think it's right to always think of law as a simple translation of questions of power and politics, but I do think that law is always a translation of a vision of justice, even if it's by accident, and no one intended it to be the case, law is always a kind of institutionalized version of a vision of how the world or society or a particular part of society should be organized. And therefore, before Adrian, you asked a question about what interdisciplinarity can bring it as legal thinkers. Everything I said there about critical perspectives is multiplied at least 10 fold when we're talking about justice, because theories of justice allow us to do amazing things with law, because we can explain to someone the consequences of what they're saying, the implications of what they're saying when they express the law. And we can also do something else, we can take our own visions of fairness and translate them into law. So this idea of how the conceptions of justice translate into law, which was your presence to read, actually can have a different connotation is how can we translate our own visions of justice into law. And the law is the only thing that we really have that can give a manifestation of justice, I would say, without law, unless we completely radically change the way we organize our society into a completely unrecognizable way, the only way conceptions of justice get into the real world is through law, I would say. And we can see that very clearly, if we read a constitution, it reads like a document about justice, whether it achieves that is a different question. But that's when we need all the social legal techniques that we were talking about before to analyze whether it actually does it on them. Absolutely. I think that's very interesting. It's a very interesting point, because often students are very hung up on the fact that their self-interest when the law is created and all the workings between law and politics are pointed out and the absence of justice. So I think I couldn't agree more with you, Luke, obviously. But I think we don't have time for this in this episode to explore this, but this is something definitely we will be looking at in the rest of our episodes. So I'll hand over to Adrian. I think she has another question for you. I do, and I think it's really interesting that you say, or you bring this all into a bit more of, let's say, a reality, because I think sometimes what we can get hung up on is the theories and Sabrina and yourself, Luke, you're both experts in theories of justice and legal theory. But I wondered if I could ask that from, I suppose, a slightly different point of view, although something you've touched on, now that we've seen the relationship between law and justice as you put it, Luke. And of course, all the other disciplines that we've been talking about in this episode today, I wonder if you could maybe talk to us a little bit more about how you think law is actually able, or perhaps unable sometimes, to articulate specific policy aims, and what relationship the law kind of entertains between public policy and politics. Yeah, I mean, this is a really interesting question, I think. And I think, cards on the table, I think, is very difficult to give a clear answer here. And I think in the modern world, maybe we'll take a step back, we want to be very technocratic, right? We want to achieve very specific things, almost in a scientific way, and law has taken on a certain form. Although we pretend to our students, when we're indoctrinating them in the first couple of years, that law is at all about these general principles and private law and all this stuff, most law that is made now is what we would really call regulation. It's very specific legislation, often secondary legislation, made by the effective with the executive branch of government and the delegated powers, which regulates very specific parts of the world, maybe regulates finance or health care, or elements of sports or the use of roads or construction processes or something. And it's trying to achieve these really, really specific minute outcomes, right? And this is really maybe where law, as we imagine it, and law, as it is, have maybe become completely separated, especially in we as legal theorists, legal scholars, legal students, especially as we imagine it, we're actually really far away from the reality of what law is. And the way in which law now tries to achieve policy goals, so policy goals, just being, you know, we want to achieve this very specific thing, we want fewer accidents in workplaces, for example, that can be a policy goal, right? There could be a way of achieving that is to say, well, there are some general standards of responsibility, for example, as what we would expect is people who've studied talk law and other things and maybe employment law, right? Or we could regulate exactly the type of clothing that's meant to be worn within different types of work sites and different inspection regimes and different reporting mechanisms and different ways of punishing, not adherents and all of these different things. And one of the things that's interesting about the second approach is it, it tries to achieve very specific policy aims, right? Legislative aims, but never actually articulates them. It's very different to how law works, right? So the way modern law tends to work through regulation is through this hyper-specialised way, which is almost unrecognizable to these kind of romantic visions of law, which I've been guilty of peddling during our conversation. And so, to some extent, I've been disingenuous, not deliberately, but I've been disingenuous and maybe idealising law. And one of the reasons, I think, law is not able to achieve these kind of grandiose outcomes, is because the way law is used by legislates it has become something quite different. It says, right, we're going to use the tool of law to influence the behaviour of very specific people in very specific circumstances, to see if we can achieve very specific policy aims, right? I think that makes, it could succeed or not. We also, we have tools to know whether it succeeds with their social legal tools. We can study, you know, is the outcome what we expected? Yes or no? But within that, we lose that kind of big aspiration to achieve justice through law. We no longer have access to those rules. We no longer have a share vocabulary between justice and law, right? When we're talking about regulations, we don't often talk about shoulds and obligations and principles and constitutional values. And we find it very difficult to actually articulate kind of lofty aims about, so to bring, obviously, lots of your workers on his own health care policy and the law, you know, we could talk in really big ways about justice and access to health care and distributive justice. But when we get into the minutiae of procurement rules within health care, we don't really have those shared vocabulary, right? And I think that's really interesting for several reasons. What we're thinking about it from the perspective of this podcast is it means that our legal tools and the ones that we share with principles of justice and morality are no longer enough. We can't rely on them. We need the kinds of tools that Sabrina was talking about before about giving us that insight into a detailed world. We need to have our legal skills in the background and that we need to go in and say, okay, what is the outcome of this? What are we trying to achieve? Let's interview people, let's talk to people, let's try and work out what the impact is. And then maybe we would say, let's bring law back to a more general set of principles. Or we would say, well, actually, that kind of law is gone, which forget about that. That's just some kind of romantic ideal. And that we actually live in a world of regulation. But I doubt that that world will achieve the goals that we want to do because we'd have to revisit all of those regulations again and again. I think one of the interesting things to come back to your general question, Adrian, is about the relationship between public policy and politics and law is that we live in a kind of, this is a non-legal statement. We live in a kind of a cultural environment in which the law maker is expected to solve all problems all the time. We have a problem, somehow solve it. And the only tool they really have, or they have two tools, one are kind of economic and financial tools. And I'm really going to give you a lot in terms of changing people's behaviour, or they're more about governing the economy, or they have regulations. They have the tools of legislation. And they try and over-achieve with legislation. And it means that we've, law is now used to achieve everything in society, whereas maybe lots of things probably wasn't the legislature who should have been trying to achieve them in the first place, that we probably shows that we've gone wrong somewhere. That's a political statement on my part. But law is almost lost in the telling detail. And I think it's very interesting that none of your students will have studied any regulation at any point. They never will have studied any regulation, and probably the three of us, in some sense, experts in law, we've studied very little regulation, although we work in areas where there is regulation, it's a really interesting thing, I think. So this is maybe an answer which is taken as down and unexpected, but it's about the culture of law used by legislatures. Law is a cultural artefact. It's a tool that's used by human beings, in particular, people who can make laws. And they have maybe rejected the spirits of law, and rejected the spirit of the rule of law we talked about before, which is not the same as law, but the rule of law is about general principles which apply to people who are easily understandable. And maybe there is a clash between what we now call public policy and politics on the one hand, and the political ideal of the rule of law, and that those two things are not compatible. So it kind of meandering answer. But I think I can bring it back to this conversation quite easily. It's that often when we talk about law, we don't have in mind necessarily our public policy aims, that might be useful for understanding it, because we kind of get lost in the detail of things. So I'm an employment lawyer by background, as well as an legal philosopher, and I think one of the major things to look at, when we're, for example, analysing employment policy and employment law and a labour law, is to say, well, what's the purpose of it? So what we're actually trying to get out of all of this cathedral of relationship between employer and employee. And then we have that, in our mind, there's an analytical framework to say, well, you know, it's employment law about more fairness of work, or more democracy of work, or re-ebalancing power dynamics, or is it about economic efficiency, or is it about social inclusion, or is it about some kind of egalitarian vision within the workplace between workers, or something else? If we have all of those things in our mind, we have a framework of analysis, which gives us, again, a kind of a rich vision for understanding the law. And that might give us another perspective to understand what is not really disciplinary perspective, in the ways we were talking about before, so disciplinary from anthropology or sociology, or various different ethnographic perspectives, or even from the perspective of political philosophy. Instead, it's to say, there are certain aims which exist within society, even if we can't fully articulate why they're important. We know that they exist. So a public policy or political goals might be a way for us to understand, well, does law achieve what we want it to achieve? I think one of the problems is we, maybe people who make the law get overly excited by public policy aims, and maybe get lost in the detail of the regulation. That's very interesting. So here we are at our last question for you, and this is not the easiest one, I would say. But we will end all of our episode by asking our guests, just like you, in their opinion, does context matter? And particularly when you look at the law, Luke, how would you define law in context? Yeah, I think it's a really brilliant question. So there is a paradox in the question, right? Because law, at least within the context in which you operate the geographical area or the disciplinary area, in which it's working, is meant to be universal, right? It's meant to be the ideal of law is that it's universal and it's neutral, and and in a way, in a similar way to justice and morality, right? We're trying to come up with arguments which are valid in all circumstances, at least in all comparable circumstances. And one of the powerful things about the emergence of law as an ideal of a three millennium or is its ability to transcend the particular or the contextual. And so in many ways, when we ask whether context matters in relation to law, it seems like a challenge, a challenge to the very thing that gives law its legitimacy, right? So I think this makes it a really powerful question. On the other hand, of course, one of the things that modern legal systems try to do is to kind of place value on the individual legal person, on that person being a barrel of private law and public law rights, of certain entitlements and values, and so on and placing real value within the legal system on context and contextualization and perspective and all those other things. So it's something that the law itself moved to embrace. So that's just I guess some context for the context question. In my opinion, this context matter, yes, context is absolutely crucial. So it's crucial from two perspectives. So to understand law, it's important to be able to articulate it from your own perspective, because as I said before, the very start, law is a way of knowing, law is a way of knowing the world, and when it's a way of knowing, it's a very subjective thing. It goes through your own mind and is a way of you interpreting the world using those skills, right? Law is a much more subjective thing as a way of knowing than it is as a kind of a social or cultural artifact. There's an imagined thing that exists in the world that's just there and it governs us, but they might not be a subjective thing. It's just a thing that exists, but in our own mind and a way of understanding the world and our ability to reinvent the context is everything and being able to understand things from a critical perspective from our own perspective becomes absolutely crucial. And if we don't do that, we're through a dereliction of our legal duties. People who are privileged enough to have a legal perspective. If we don't take that contextual and subjective perspective seriously, we'll never really achieve awful legal potential. I think that's a slightly different perspective on context and one which is usually hinted at in the question, because of course there is the law in context movement, which was very much related to the social legal movement, which is to say that law can only be understood from legal perspectives. It needs to also be understood in the context of thousand other perspectives, social legal or critical, theoretical, political, public policy, context. Those things are absolutely true. We have to look at law through those things because we have to work out whether law in the way we reimagine it actually does the things we're saying. But as I said before, if we don't have those perspectives from outside the law, we can't hope to be good critical and the standards of law from within the law in any case. So I think in a way there is a false dichotomy, although I've tried to defend it sometimes during this conversation, the idea that there is something worthwhile in just a legal perspective. That legal perspective is inherently informed by a contextual critical analysis of what law is, what it means to us, how we want to reinvent it, what we're trying to say through the law, and what kinds of ways of understanding law in the real world of influence our perspective on the law. So for me, from my perspective, at least as a legal theory is context matters because context gives us that window for us to express ourselves in this legal way of knowing. I think for other people context will be important for other reasons. I mean, the reason I would take the perspective I do is because I take seriously the idea that legal knowledge is a powerful thing, and context has to translate itself back into legal knowledge because otherwise our knowledge dissipates. It doesn't get back into the legal world. You know, legal perspectives are their emancipatory, their empowering, but they only do that thing if you take part in the legal exchange. If you come back and say here's an alternative legal perspective from this context, from this perspective, rather than thinking about ourselves as permanent outsiders. Outsiders should be brought into the conversation, law should be in a egalitarian and inclusive way of knowing and inclusive discourse, and that would be impossible if contexts were excluded because it would by definition exclude alternative perspectives by just saying there is a universal viewpoint. So it comes right back then to asking about what law is, right? So one of the things is that I said before law aspires to universality, but if law is a way of knowing, and it's humans who know things, law can't actually be universal. It's just an aspiration to universal. It's a way of expressing contextualised viewpoints through a shareable form of knowledge. It's universally the way that everyone can understand it, but it can be expressed lots of different ideas and can be inclusive in some idealised sense at least in doing that. So that would be my answer to that question. I look forward to hearing other people's answers to that question though, it's really good. Definitely there are going to be a lot more interesting answers to this question over the next couple of episodes. It just leaves us now to thank you very much Luke for being our very first guest on the city law schools law and society podcast. Thank you so much for having me. You've been listening to the law and society podcast brought to you by the city law school at city university of London. We hope you enjoyed it and look forward to you joining us soon for another episode.