Department of History of Political and Legal Thought would like to invite you to the open lecture of dr. hab. Rafał Mańko from the University of Amsterdam. The lecture, entitled "Critical Theory of Adjudication: Judicial Decision-Making and the Political", will be held at the Faculty of Law and Administration of Jagiellonian University (Krupnicza Street 33, room 103) on March 29th 2019.

[PL: Doktoranci będą mogli zaliczyć udział w wykładzie do bloku wykładów gościnnych]

Critical Theory of Adjudication: Judicial Decision-Making and the Political

A well-established view on adjudication rests on the neat of separation of law and politics: the legitimacy of judicial decision-making is based on the idea that judges ‘apply the law’, rather than take independent decisions. The lecture will argue that at least some judicial decisions belong to the sphere of the political, as conceptualised by Chantal Mouffe, because judges almost always enjoy a certain degree of discretionality and often take decisions concerning fundamental social antagonisms. This ‘adjudication in the field of the political’ should not be treated as something inherently wrong, but rather as an inevitable aspect of the rule of law. This opens questions of legitimacy, which no longer can rest only on the ‘application of law to the facts’, and ethics of adjudication, understood as each and every individual judge’s personal moral responsibility for incrementally developing the law. Furthermore, an acknowledgment of the political element in adjudication calls for a broader democratic scrutiny of judicial decision-making which can no longer be treated as a purely ‘technical’ activity of professional jurists. 

Rafał Mańko is a critical legal theorist, focusing on issues of legal interpretation and adjudication. His most recent monograph, W stronę krytycznej filozofii orzekania [Towards a Critical Philosophy of Adjudication] builds a theory of judicial application of law factoring in such aspects as the political and ideology. He received his PhD in law from the University of Amsterdam and his habilitation in law from the University of Wrocław. Currently he is an external fellow at the University of Amsterdam and an associated researcher and principal investigator at the Centre for Legal Education and Social Theory (CLEST) at the University of Wrocław.