Introduction
In "Empire of the Text," Marcin Matczak proposes a revolutionary vision of the state in which judges cease to be mere officials and instead become engineers of reality. The author advocates for a departure from rigid formalism in favor of holism, where law serves as a tool for actively designing the world. While this vision promises global rationality, it raises fundamental questions about the limits of judicial power, the predictability of rulings, and the risk of replacing democratic control with subjective moral vectors. In this article, you will learn why this erudite construct is sometimes called the "Trojan horse" of modern jurisprudence.
Matczak’s Holism and the Crisis of Formalism
The foundation of Matczak’s proposal is interpretive holism. It assumes that every regulation must be filtered through three batteries of directives: linguistic, systemic, and functional. Only when these are finalized by the purpose of the law is the interpretation complete. Matczak rightly challenges formalism, arguing that the mechanical application of the letter of the law is an illusion. He invokes H.L.A. Hart’s concept of the "open texture" of language—the inherent vagueness of terms forces judges to make choices.
However, abandoning the "modest virtues" of formalism carries serious risks. When hard rules give way to soft values, the predictability of law drops drastically. The system becomes hypersensitive to political tensions, and citizens lose certainty about whether their case will be decided according to the letter of the law or the "postulated world" of the judge. This shift causes the law to surprise rather than coordinate social actions.
Interpretation or Lawmaking: The Dispute Over Discourse Boundaries
Matczak’s project draws from Ronald Dworkin’s integrity, treating law as a "chain novel" that binds the past to the future. Also crucial are Robert Alexy’s principles, understood as "optimization requirements." A judge, weighing these principles, can no longer hide behind literalism. Unlike Jürgen Habermas, who sees the legitimacy of law in the discourse procedure, Matczak shifts the weight to the objective. This makes the boundary between interpretation and norm-creation elusive.
In this framework, judicial discretion moves from the system's input to its output. The justification of a verdict stops answering why a norm applies to a set of facts and starts explaining why a particular composition of values "closes the world" in a specific instance. Such a construction weakens social control mechanisms, making judges the sole custodians of the "spirit of the system."
The Sociological Deficit and Theoretical Eclecticism
Critics point to a sociological deficit in the project. Matczak focuses on the text, ignoring Weber’s "iron cage of bureaucracy" or Leon Petrażycki’s psychology of law recipients. This system overlooks millions of citizens who are guided by habit rather than reading judicial justifications. Furthermore, "Empire of the Text" is an eclectic edifice, combining contradictory currents: hermeneutics, cognitive psychology, and semantic externalism, making its architecture unstable.
The author calls Matczak’s proposal a Trojan horse because, under the noble banner of fighting the pathologies of formalism, it smuggles in a vision where judges, not citizens, decide the hierarchy of values. An alternative could be the rabbinic model, where interpretive pluralism is limited by an awareness of the consequences for the community. Without hard accountability mechanisms, holism may become merely a smokescreen for expanding judicial power in the name of the interpreters' personal preferences.
Summary
In its quest to design the world, the law must not forget that this world belongs to the citizens, not the lawyers. Their fundamental right is to know what is permitted and what is forbidden. If our sophisticated theories cannot guarantee this predictability, they become nothing more than empty platitudes. Matczak’s holism may civilize interpretation, but only on the condition of building rigorous argumentative standards that prevent the polyphony of values from turning into a legal cacophony.
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