From Numbers to Post-Logocentric Normative Craft : On the Use of Indicators and Comparable Constructs in Contemporary Legal Analysis

The use of indicators for several purposes, including policy design and diffusion, has drawn attention from international organizations and legal scholars in recent years. Indicators are often seen as elements that make up “technical” (as opposed to “legal”) norms, and also as devices that link “scientific laws” to legal rules. One strand of argument explores the idea that law in some contexts has become subject to the influence of a “mathematical turn” coming from within “neoclassical” economics. The paper articulates some ideas about how legal criticism can be worked into the use indicators in contemporary legal analysis. The paper thus discusses, in stylized form, relevant relationships between law, taken as a social practice, and specialized means by which legal craft has sought to move “beyond” commonplace moralities of received worldviews. The paper suggests that, while rhetoric remained more linked to the development of political (not jural) ideas, the direct use by jurists of dialectics, philology, history and the “emulated” use of mathematics (law more geometrico) have offered pathways for legal craft to attempt overcoming established moralities. The rise of statistics and accounting techniques has tended to occur within the bounds of the rationalist idea of a mathesis universalis. Yet, despite all these transitions, the question must be asked how far legal craft has remained a means to actuate the exercise power (thus keeping its role as logocentric craft, to use the language of Derrida). The paper finally suggests that the modernist transformation of mathematics -- which paralleled the rise of modernist trends in art and aesthetics -- and the emergence of computer technology and the internet have the potential of unleashing a process by which social coordination can be made to move beyond markets (as characterized by neoclassical economics) and become embedded into law revamped as a post-logocentric normative craft.