Legislating with dignity. Form as legislation’s inner morality

Sakellaridis Mangouras, Neofytos (2024) Legislating with dignity. Form as legislation’s inner morality. PhD thesis, University of Glasgow.

Abstract

This thesis studies the conceptual form of legislation to create a guide for improving lawmaking as a craft. It learns from abstract ideas to establish a theoretical framework, providing tangible advice to lawmakers on how to be more faithful to their craft and satisfy their polity’s legislative intentions.

The thesis’s Part I is dedicated to developing a thicker meaning of form to show that the contextual backdrop of the communal act of lawmaking creates a normative loading that conditions legislating. Inspired by the work of Lon Fuller, it transfers his insights on the ‘morality that makes law possible” onto the social enterprise of making law. It uncovers the practical implications of the normative loading of form and explains the directions they give partakers in legislating and law.

Part II creates a description of how legislators should act towards the craft of legislating by maintaining “the dignity of legislating.” This novel concept is built off the work of Jeremy Waldron and describes what aspects of form lawmakers must be alert of in order to serve their craft in a more informed way. This part carefully defines the concept by disambiguating, laying the groundwork, and unpacking its constituent parts.

Part III gathers the insights of the previous Parts and puts them to the test. The test case it utilizes is legislative conditionality, where legislatures must act at the behest of external actors to satisfy conditions to state agreements. The thesis unpacks the explosive and catastrophic potentiality of conditionality to highlight specific instances where legislatures failed at the craft of legislating. A particular point of guidance is identified and analyzed through each of these failures, creating a non-finite list of points of attention. In all, the thesis intends to make legislating better as a craft by making it truer to form.

• Item Type: Thesis (PhD)
• Qualification Level: Doctoral
• Subjects: K Law > K Law (General)
• Colleges/Schools: College of Social Sciences > School of Law
• Supervisor's Name: Christodoulidis, Professor Emilios and Goldoni, Professor Marco
• Date of Award: 2024
• Depositing User: Theses Team
• Unique ID: glathesis:2024-84362
• Copyright: Copyright of this thesis is held by the author.
• Date Deposited: 19 Jun 2024 10:12
• Last Modified: 19 Jun 2024 14:11
• Thesis DOI: 10.5525/gla.thesis.84362
• URI: https://theses.gla.ac.uk/id/eprint/84362