This is a seminar organised by the Edinburgh Legal Theory Research Group. The speaker Jason Krentos, from the University of Hertfordshire, will be presenting his paper on The Rule of Law as a Community of Strangers: Bottom-Up Reasons.
Our seminars consist of a 30-minute presentation given by the author, followed by a 60 to 90-minute Q&A. This IS NOT a pre-read event, BUT the paper will be circulated beforehand through our mailing list. To subscribe, please send an email to edinburgh.legal.theory@gmail.com.
About the speaker
Jason Krentos is a Lecturer in Law at the University of Hertfordshire, where he teaches jurisprudence and EU law. He recently completed a PhD at the University of Manchester on motivational frameworks in the rule of law. Before entering academia, he worked in lobbying and consulting in Brussels.
About the event
Legal theorists have long debated the foundational criteria for identifying law and distinguishing it from non-law. Prevailing approaches often appeal to social facts, empirically embedded principles, or the identification of a foundational Grundnorm (basic norm) from which legal authority is derived. This paper offers an alternative account, contending that the boundaries of law are constituted by bottom-up reasons—reasons that are intelligible to agents situated within a rule-of-law community composed of mutual strangers. This notion of “strangerdom” refers to the condition in which individuals, though governed by common legal structures, remain epistemically and normatively distinct. Drawing on Lon Fuller’s conception of the “inner morality of law,” this account presumes that individuals are heterogeneous agents, each possessing unique and dynamic intentions. Consequently, no agent can be expected to fully apprehend the shifting empirical motivations of others. This generates a “knowledge problem” that challenges interpretive traditions such as Originalism and forms of “data-malleable interpretivism,” both of which presuppose empirical understandings or stable meanings that are inaccessible in a community of strangers.
Within such a legal community, the set of interpreters—be they litigants, judges, compliance officers, or other legal actors—is necessarily open-ended. A lawyer who is attentive to the demands of the rule of law must recognize the relational vulnerability inherent in legal interpretation: all participants are, in effect, at one another’s interpretive mercy. Thus, legal reasoning should be understood not as a means of retrieving historical intentions, but as a practice that sustains the conditions under which self-governing agents can participate in shared legal interpretation.
This “strangerdom approach” views law not as the product of singular, foundational moments—such as a constitutional founding—but as a continuously evolving network of normative relations. Each legal agent contributes to both the identification and production of interpretive gaps, a feature intrinsic to governance by general rules. However, the mere autonomy described by Fuller is insufficient for securing the kind of interpretive determinacy appropriate to a community of strangers. Agents may engage in rent-seeking or invoke interpretive methods that rely on privileged, closed forms of knowledge, such as consensus-based meanings. The Fullerite legal agent, therefore, is not merely someone with “capacity autonomy” (in Mattew Kramer’s terms), nor a utility-maximizing homo economicus, but rather one committed to maintaining the integrity of a legal ontology structured around mutual estrangement.
This legal agent is a person who is motivated by mutually knowable reasons that I characterize as “bottom-up.” These are reasons motivated by goods internal to a practice—such as competition in sport. Unlike private empirical motivations, such reasons can form a basis of shared knowledge among strangers. Another characteristic of these reasons is that they do not end in opaque assertions—“just because”—which render legal interpretation inaccessible to the unknown potential litigant and thereby undermine participation in the rule of law as a public, reason-giving enterprise. Upholding the rule of law requires an architecture of reasons that are accessible, shareable, and fundamentally oriented toward the conditions of mutual intelligibility among strangers, who are themselves potential reason givers.
