STATE, LAW AND INSTITUTIONS: A STUDY ON JURIDIFICATION

The paper aims to analyse the current process of juridification that is altering the relation between the political and the legal realms. In the first part of the article, I discuss the existing literature on the theme: the dominant view — which finds in Habermas its precursor — reduce the increasing use of law to a process of bureaucratization, reification and depoliticization of the social field which transforms law into an instrument at the service of neoliberal governance. However, a mapping of the phenomenon reveals also an increasing use of legal remedies “from below”, to wit, by social actors who seek to reach out to courts and avail themselves of legal remedies in order to have social and political claims satisfied. I argue that this kind of juridical practices show new forms of negotiation between social actors and the state that are certainly political, even if they are played in spaces not traditionally appointed to political struggles. I claim that this “politics of juridification” require a radical re-thinking of both law as a medium and law as an institution. In order to do this, I call into question Tarde, Deleuze and Guattari and Latour, who help to redefine the juridical functioning in terms of semiotic machine, linkages and networks.