Philosophy Of Law For The Modern World

Would it not have been unimaginably exhilarating if this court verdict and (hypothetical) sentence had binding power? But it does not. Hence, the struggle continues, and we shall never give up. That this is worthwhile was recently confirmed when the news broke about the World Health Organisation suffering a colossal setback, when it failed to get the amendments approved which would assure its sought-after ‘pandemic treaty’ to be ratified. There are other victories too, which we, the resistance, are pursuing, without the least thought of ever backing down.

As distinguished from a litigation, a differend would be a case of conflict between two parties, that cannot be equitably resolved for lack of a rule of judgment applicable to both arguments.

In simpler terms, unlike a 'litigation,' where a legal judgment is made - on the basis of rules or laws the parties agree to - about the rightness and wrongness of the claims or arguments involved, an instance where there is no agreement about the relevant rules of judgement, constitutes a differend.

At issue is the fact that developers rely on commercial property rights pertaining to land development and profit-oriented sales, while aborigines argue that their ancestral burial grounds are located in the disputed land - a manifest case of a differend: clashing claims resting on different 'rules of judgement' - a Western notion of property, on the one hand, and a pre-modern conception of land as not 'belonging' to anyone, but as being sacrosanct to those whose ancestors are interred there.

Keep in mind that this terrain was - and still is, largely - shot through with what is probably the most pervasive differend the world has witnessed in the history of humankind.

To conclude: if a differend indexes a place where it is futile to try to bring different parties to an agreement because adjudicating their divergent standpoints by means of the 'phrases' employed by only one of them would ineluctably constitute an injustice, is there any possibility of overcoming or 'dissolving' the differend, given that it cannot be resolved?

As far as appearances go, if one of the parties to the differend factually gains the cratological upper hand so decisively that all opposition disappears, and the triumphant party effectively clears the decks of all dissent, it would ostensibly disappear, although in principle it would still obtain.

The differend would be overcome, or dissolved, only if something - an event of such far-reaching import - would occur, that one side of the field within which the differend manifests itself, would, for all intents and purposes, be decisively defeated or demonstrably proved to rest on spurious grounds. 

https://brownstone.org/articles/philosophy-of-law-for-the-modern-world/