For decades, critics of the law have made it their mission to expose the fiction of legal neutrality. They, or perhaps I should say “we”, have revelled in exposing structural biases that permeate the law, and in pointing out the political motives underneath the carapace of legal arguments. This work—unmasking law’s pretensions—was only meaningful for as long as enough actors bothered to wear the legal mask in the first place.
But today, that mask is slipping—or has been tossed aside altogether. Only a few actors still make the effort of putting it on. Neither Israel nor the US took the trouble of legally justifying their armed attack on Iran in June 2025. Nor did the plain illegality of those acts prevent the German chancellor Friedrich Merz from condoning them as Drecksarbeit—“dirty work” that simply had to be done. There is precious little left to unmask. If masks no longer fool anyone, might critics of the law pivot from unmasking to reconstruction—or to forging new vocabularies of legitimacy altogether?
Legal critique, it seems, has run out of targets.[1] Now what?
This turn away from the law is not something most critics would have wished for. Quite to the contrary, most of them have been quite content with the steady continuance of legal masquerades, and, when it suited them, many joined in and employed the law as a means to their ends.
“Far from being a simple ideological mask,” the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu once observed, “a rhetoric of autonomy, neutrality, and universality … may be the basis of a real autonomy … [for] the juridical field.”[2] And one towering critic of law even professed that “whatever historical baggage, including bad faith” is embedded in a culture of formal legal argument, “its ideals include those of accountability, equality, reciprocity and transparency, and it comes to us with an embedded vocabulary of (formal) rights.”[3]
But what use is this culture of formal legal argument when nearly anything apparently can be dressed up in the mantle of the law?
When Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, it did offer a legal justification. Call it bogus, cynical, or bullshit, the point is that Russia still bothered with the legal charade. More than anything else, Russia did this as a mocking commentary on unconvincing legal justifications of the past—think of the US-led invasion of Iraq, its strikes in Libya, Syria, Somalia, Sudan, and elsewhere. Russia did not take the law seriously, but then again, who does? And what would that even mean?
Anyone who wants to unmask legal arguments must appreciate the practice of putting on a mask in the first place. Unmasking, however, could itself never be the endgame of critique. The critical gesture, rather, has stood in the service of revealing nasty politics with the hope of changing them. That the hidden truth would be recognized as ugly was largely taken for granted.
Many legal critiques have gone beyond the particular politics of any individual actor to expose structural biases and double standards. This is arguably where the essential, direct action lies. It also seems more closely in tune with the aims of those who turn to law in their struggles from the bottom up. I am reminded, here, of the words of the Palestinian human rights activist Issa Amro, who insists that international legal mechanisms are crucial to hold perpetrators to account.
The brazen omission of any legal justification for the attack on Iran or the offhand attempts to couch the genocidal violence in Gaza in cloaks of legality reflect the relevant actors’ sense of certainty that they will not have to deal with the law’s consequences. Sure enough, shaped by the most powerful actors, the law is often weakest when it matters most. If nothing else, however, history teaches that nothing lasts forever. Those who discard the law’s vocabulary today may soon find themselves without the tools for legitimizing their actions tomorrow. They may soon look like fools. History is fickle enough.
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- Footnote
[1] Twenty years ago, Bruno Latour argued similarly in “Why Has Critique Run out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern,” Critical Inquiry 30 (2004): 225-248.
[2] Pierre Bourdieu, “The Force of Law,” The Hastings Law Journal 38 (1987): 805-853.
[3] Martti Koskenniemi, From Apology to Utopia (Cambridge University Press, 2005), 616.
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Cover: Nairy Baghramian, Misfits, 2021; walnut wood, varnished casted aluminium, marble; installation view Galleria d’Arte Moderna, Milan, Italy; photograph Nick Ash. Courtesy and copyright of the Winsing Art Foundation Taipei, Taiwan
