Abstract

Law is a concept not represented by anything except our ideas about it. Nothing is intrinsically of a legal nature. Our discourse about law is what makes law law. So whence our discourse? Why, specifically, do we tend to resist disassociating law from the state? After emphasising why shaping our understanding of law is a meaningfully inquiry beyond analytical accuracy, this article discusses a few such grounds for our resistance to transnational law without the state: law as state law is actually a fairly good theory; paradigms intrinsically resist change; certain forgotten prudential political rules are now wrongly remembered as analytical precepts; there exists sheer political resistance to the emancipation of powers outside the state; attempts are made by those who shape our understanding of law to please their constituencies; the pursuit by academics of a legal practice interferes with legal thinking; there are vested interests in the current state-centred system; and one may experience a sense of anti-intellectualism in certain areas of the legal academy.