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Secularization, Legal Indeterminacy, And Habermas's Discourse Theory Of Law, Mark C. Modak-Truran

Mark C Modak-Truran

The unexpected vitality of religion has motivated scholars in many fields like anthropology, sociology, political science, international relations, and philosophy to revisit their assumptions about the supposed secularization of their disciplines. Despite this robust re-examination in other disciplines, the secularization of law arguably constitutes the most widely-held but least-examined assumption in contemporary legal theory. Legal scholars and philosophers have surprisingly ignored one exception—Jürgen Habermas’s discourse theory of law. Accordingly, this article focuses on Habermas’s sophisticated awareness of the tension between the secularization of law and legal indeterminacy and treats his discourse theory of law as a significant test of the …