Private Law Theory

ABSTRACT
This paper argues that conventional jurisprudence and its cognate, legal pluralism, are illequipped to address contemporary modes of governance that operate through spatial abandonment and the legitimation of harm. Their shared reliance on a ‘politics of recognition’ has degenerated into a managerial discourse that, far from offering recourse, perpetuates colonial logics by forcing the visceral experience of injustice into pre-established and anaesthetised institutional grammars. In critiquing this theoretical and political impasse, this paper develops an alternative framework: Relational Legal Pluralism (RLP). The central thesis of RLP is that a foundational shift in jurisprudence is required, which moves from a temporal-ontological focus on what law is to a spatial-ethical focus on what happens between subjects. Such a reorientation enables a ‘jurisprudence of the wound’, wherein law is understood not as an abstract set of rules but as something that emerges from the lived, material experience of relational harm. To construct this framework, the paper places critical and decolonial theory into a dialogue of “critique and cooperation” with the Japanese philosophy of Watsuji Tetsurō. Drawing on Watsuji’s concepts of fūdō (milieu), aidagara (betweenness), and kū (emptiness), it forges a methodology of ‘Law in the Accusative’ – a legal perspective that begins from the standpoint of the harmed subject. Applying this lens to the Grenfell Tower fire and the European Union’s external border regime reveals a shared institutional pathology structured by profound institutional deafness, deliberately diffused responsibility, and the sovereign negation of legal status. Ultimately, RLP moves beyond the limited horizon of recognition to propose ‘relational repair’ as a demanding political practice. This is framed as a ‘jurisprudence of the threshold’, which offers conceptual tools to navigate the fraught choice between strategic institutional engagement and a principled decolonial refusal.

Murphy, Michael, Beyond Recognition: A Jurisprudence of the Wound and the Politics of Relational Repair (July 12, 2025).