York University

Graduate Student, Osgoode Hall Law School

LLB (Azad University, Mashad), LLM (University of Tehran), LLM (Panthéon-Sorbonne, Paris), PhD in law (Panthéon-Sorbonne), and PhD student at Osgoode Hall Law School (Toronto)

Thesis Title: The State and the Philosophy of Law

About

I am a cloudy man whose father is the Sky (le Ciel) and mother is the Earth (la Terre). I can speak and write in three languages: Persian, French, and English. My passion and meaning of existence are reading and writing about justice and
freedom! I love everything that challenges rules and authority. I have neither ideology whatsoever nor idol whoever! I am nothing but myself. I hope that I am aware of not only my vanity, but also my paradoxes (or hypocrisy?)! For instance, I am a law student when I strongly stand against law schools and law professors as well! I am afraid also of being accepted in academia, which I regard as a Mafia system, at the price of bowing down before the academic Godfathers. Thus, I would like to thank very much my professors for enduring an unusual student like me!
If Man is a Wolf to Man, the State is an Evil to Man. Indeed, the State is the Most Monstrous Institution created by the Wildest Animal, that is to say Humankind. And I am the Loneliest Man who goes to fight theoretically against this Monster in the Most Unequal Fight. I have nothing to lose but my Slavery imposed by the Society and the State together. Who has nothing to lose would fight strongly.     

"Does Our Existence need the State?"

Does our existence need to be regulated by the State? This is the legal and philosophical question of my thesis. The answer to this question goes hand in hand with the necessity of the State. I define human existence as humankind in her whole physical and psychological identity in relation with herself, others, and environment. I define the State as an institution that imposes its norms upon a population within a territory by using executive, legislative, and judicial powers. In the thesis, I principally focus on the two latter, since, without denying the importance of the executive, in the West the statute law and judge-made law define the frame of our existence (the Sacred Rule of Law). Any attempt to escape from this legal frame is somehow punished.   
That existential question causes two groups of intellectuals: “the proponents of the State” and “the opponents of the State” who have developed two ideas about “Statism” and “Stateless”. Each group is divided into many different ideas (e.g. capitalism, socialism, anarcho-capitalism, and anarcho-socialism). I only analyze the latter for some reasons. First of all, from time immemorial, a band of philosophers and lawyers have justified the necessity of the State: Protagoras, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Hobbes, Hume, Locke, Rousseau, Hegel, Bentham, Marx, Austin, Kelsen, H. L. A. Hart, John Rawls, Joseph Raz, John Rawls, etc. Unsurprisingly, their ideas are well known in the law school. As a matter of fact, we can observe the State and its legal system everywhere! Secondly, anarchy is at best useless and utopian, and at worst a kind of psychosocial and dangerous illness in the law school. Thirdly, the more we think that we completely know the State, the more it stays out of our knowledge and control to become a gigantic machine that is impotent regarding individual and social justice. In this case, the current global financial crisis is a striking example. Paradoxically, at the same time, the State remains an omnipresent power that regulates our existence before birth (e.g. by regulating our mother’s lives), during life (e.g. by regulating education system), and after death (e.g. by regulating our will). In this case, the anarchist critics and alternatives preciously provide new refection about our freedom in hyper-regulated life. Thus, it would be important to analyze the anarchist ideas about law and punishment. 
By using library research and collecting information principally from books and articles, my methodology is based on criminal law and philosophy. My challenge stems from the fact the anarchists are not often lawyers rather they are philosophers, economists, and politicians. Analyzing their ideas regarding the legal system cannot be reduced to a mere legal methodology, but it requires understanding other disciplines (e.g. history, religion, myth, philosophy, ethics, economics, politics, anthropology, sociology, psychology, femininity, and environment) whereby they undermine the existence of the legal system, and propose some alternatives. Indeed, my unconventional methodology is “surrealistic” insomuch as it analyzes and criticizes the legal system in a libertarian manner, that is to say outside the law’s Empire. It is based on “legal anarchism” that I define as a discipline which, on the one hand, critically analyzes the law and punishment in terms of those disciplines, and, on the other hand, presents some alternatives. This methodology would be explained by the relationship between anarchism and surrealism. As a matter of fact, in legal anarchism, reality and imagination overlap each other to desire a non-hierarchical and decentralized society. 
My analysis is divided into two parts. Firstly, I try analyzing the anarchist critics of law and punishment. Then, I show their alternatives to the legal system. Although I do not deny the anarchist merits especially regarding their critics, I am so critical vis-à-vis their alternatives. However, the anarchist alternatives almost never have been implemented in our modern society under the pretext of utopianism or unfeasibility. Moreover, our modern society is soaked with a kind of “State-Educational Indoctrination” by an army of politicians and scientists who justify the necessity of the State to the detriment of destroying our freedom.       
Despite its multidisciplinary and abundant literature, legal anarchism suffers from the lack of modern alternatives. Thus, I try contributing to legal anarchism by building a bridge between its traditional ideas and our modern life requiring new regulation that cannot be miniaturized according to the simple anarchist life. Is it a kind of the modernization of legal anarchism? Maybe! Besides, if I cannot present any alternative to the current legal systems, I am not so worried because countless great thinkers have already presented many different alternatives in the frames of “ism”.     
My thesis is neither an apology for nor a pamphlet against legal anarchism rather it is a paper for individual, social, economic, and political freedom. Although I do not present any dogmatic idea, I keep my natural right to criticize. In reality, I have nothing in this world unless my ideas. 

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